CIRCOSTRADA × SIPAM: Visionary Placemaking for Outdoor Arts

At SIPAM 2026, the joint plenary CIRCOSTRADA × SIPAM: Visionary Placemaking for Outdoor Arts – Bridging Policy and Practice brought together Bruno Costa, Co-Director of Bússola in Portugal; Antonia Kuzmanić, Artistic Director of ROOM 100 in Croatia; Dan Bartha, Curator and Coordinator of Outdoor Events in Romania; Iulia Popovici, performing arts critic and curator at Observator cultural; Rachel Clare, founding member of Circostrada and Artistic Director & CEO of Crying Out Loud in the United Kingdom; and Simona-Mirela Miculescu, Ambassador and Permanent Delegate of Romania to UNESCO. The session was moderated by Alice Brunot, Coordinator of Circostrada.

The conversation opened with a paradox. Circus and outdoor arts are among the most visible, accessible and widely attended cultural forms. They fill streets, squares and parks. They reach people who may never enter a theatre. They create shared experiences across generations, social backgrounds and communities. Yet, as Alice Brunot underlined at the beginning of the plenary, they remain among the least recognized forms in cultural policy.

Circostrada, she explained, is “the network for contemporary circus and outdoor performing arts”, bringing together 182 members from more than 45 countries, with a mission focused on the recognition, structuring and visibility of outdoor arts and contemporary circus. In Sibiu, where the network gathered for its General Assembly, the partnership with SIPAM offered a timely opportunity to move the conversation beyond the artistic field and into the space where practice meets policy.

“Circus and outdoor arts bring culture directly into public space,” Brunot said, “and transform streets, squares and public spaces into places of encounter.” They bring culture directly to people, often free of charge, and reach those “who may never step inside a theatre.” The key question of the plenary was therefore not whether these art forms matter, but why their impact is still so difficult to translate into lasting support.

The answer, as the speakers showed throughout the morning, lies somewhere between history, policy, infrastructure, artistic risk and the fragile relationship between a city and its public spaces.

Sibiu: from a grey city to an outdoor cultural stage

For Dan Bartha, the discussion was inseparable from the story of Sibiu itself. FITS has become one of the clearest examples in Romania of how outdoor arts can transform the identity of a city. But that transformation, he suggested, did not happen overnight.

“When I came to Sibiu, it was around 1993. Sibiu was really a grey city, with nothing happening in the cultural life of the city,” he recalled. The turning point came through the vision of Constantin Chiriac, who was then looking for a team and was, as Bartha remembered, “a very beautiful coincidence.” The first editions of the festival started modestly, but the strategy was already ambitious: to offer the city the chance to become one of the most visited cultural destinations in the region, not only for its architectural beauty, but “for the beauty of performing arts all over the city.”

“This is the way in which outdoor arts and contemporary circus can really change the city,” Bartha said.

What changed was not only the programme, but also the audience. In the beginning, people may not have fully understood what was happening to the city. But repetition, exposure and trust created a different kind of public.

“Year after year, they became a really very good public,” Bartha said. “I heard from many of you, and not only from you, but also from the artists, that our public is really an educated one. They already know where to go, how to select the performances they want to see.”

In Sibiu, outdoor arts have trained the city to look, gather, choose and participate.

Rachel Clare, founding member of Circostrada and Artistic Director & CEO of Crying Out Loud, spoke about placemaking from the perspective of long-term work with communities. For her, the transformative potential of outdoor arts lies in their ability “to empower communities, to inspire creativity, and to cultivate a sense of belonging and a pride of place.” Being in Sibiu, she said, made that very visible. “I can really sense the pride of the place here.”

But Clare insisted that placemaking is also about creating meaningful relationships between artists, participants and audiences. “We have the potential to rejuvenate and to redefine the narrative of a place,” she said, adding that the key word is “meaningful”.

That meaning becomes particularly important in a time of political and financial instability. Clare spoke of “testing times”, of the challenges posed by the far right, and of the difficulties created by short-term funding and last-minute funding decisions. In such a context, artistic risk becomes both necessary and difficult to contain.

“When you have risk, you also have the unexpected,” she said. “And sometimes the unexpected can lead to the unknown.”

For Clare, authentic placemaking requires patience, partnership and stubbornness. In her work in Portsmouth and the Solent area, Crying Out Loud has developed residencies, training, mentoring and bespoke projects with artists from the local area, but also from Hong Kong, Lithuania and Morocco. The aim was not to import a model, but to stitch together local and international knowledge.

“Since we arrived three and a half years ago, our support and mentoring has helped quadruple the success rate for Arts Council applications from people in the area,” she said. “That is just because we were giving support.”

She also quoted an idea heard earlier during SIPAM: when someone in a room has a crazy idea, that person, or perhaps a second person, must hold on to it “like a dog without letting go of a bone.”

For placemaking to work, she suggested, the same tenacity is needed from artists, communities, funders and institutions alike.

From space to place

Bruno Costa, Co-Director of Bússola in Portugal, offered a precise definition of placemaking. The concept, he reminded the audience, comes from urbanism and can be understood as “a collaborative and intentional process.” It does not emerge from nothing, and it cannot be reduced to a political decision.

“It needs something more than just a decision,” Costa said.

Placemaking, he explained, transforms spaces into vibrant and functional areas where people can gather, connect and thrive. A room, a square or a street may be a space, but it becomes a place through use, meaning and belonging.

“What is the use that people give to an empty space?” he asked. “What is the meaning and the belonging that people can give to that space?”

For Costa, placemaking must be rooted in the needs and cultural identity of the community. It is “visionary”, but also practical. It is inclusive, collaborative, flexible and adaptable. It is not simply about delivering a design, a project or a policy based on one person’s idea.

“It is not just about infrastructure alone,” he said. “It is never done by one single person, and it is never top-down organized.”

This distinction became one of the central ideas of the plenary: outdoor arts can activate public space, but only if the process respects the people who already inhabit it.

Antonia Kuzmanić, Artistic Director of ROOM 100 in Croatia, brought the discussion into a different geography: small towns, islands and villages where contemporary art rarely appears.

“In Croatia, the whole cultural ecosystem is very centralized in two big cities,” she said, referring to Split and Zagreb. The situation applies to cultural life more broadly. For the past six years, ROOM 100 has developed a programme called Circus on Periphery. The title, she explained, refers both to the position of Croatian contemporary circus within the European sector and to the organization’s desire to bring contemporary circus to places that are themselves peripheral.

They work in small cities, islands, villages and communities where contemporary art “in general does not happen.” In many of these places, the cultural infrastructure is fragile. During the Yugoslav period, Kuzmanić said, many small towns had cinemas, but after the collapse of communism, many were abandoned or turned into traditional cultural centres. The activities hosted there are often folk dance, painting workshops, hunting association gatherings or local food competitions.

“And then we are coming with contemporary circus, which is still a big enigma for the majority of people in Croatia,” she said. What ROOM 100 learned, often through mistakes, is that outdoor arts cannot arrive as a one-time exotic event. “It cannot be a singular event, it cannot be an exotic event,” Kuzmanić said. “We do not want to have this atmosphere of circuses coming to town, which means also circuses leaving the town.”

Instead, the organization identifies local partners: artistic organizations, NGOs working with children and youth, neighbourhood associations, or sometimes one person rooted in the community. The goal is to support a yearly programme related to contemporary and outdoor art, not a one-off intervention. The process is deliberately horizontal. ROOM 100 may propose artists and activities, but the final decisions are made together with local partners.

Public space as cultural infrastructure

From the UNESCO perspective, Ambassador Simona-Mirela Miculescu brought both institutional clarity and political encouragement. Asked whether public space could be recognized as cultural infrastructure, she explained that UNESCO instruments do not currently provide a formal mechanism for protecting public space as such.

The 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, she said, is not designed to inscribe or protect individual spaces. Its purpose is to support “the policies, institutions and conditions that allow diverse cultural expressions to emerge, to circulate and to become accessible to the public.”

Similarly, the UNESCO Creative Cities Network does not protect individual public spaces, but recognizes cities that place creativity, cultural participation and sustainable development at the heart of their urban vision.

But this does not make the question less relevant. On the contrary, Miculescu argued, it invites a clearer recognition of the cultural function of public space.

“Outdoor arts are particularly powerful in this regard, precisely because they bring culture closer to people and place artistic expression at the centre of civic life, beyond formal venues,” she said.

Public space may not be formally protected by UNESCO through these instruments, she continued, but it can be better recognized, supported and activated through cultural policy.

“Supporting outdoor arts means supporting cultural democracy,” Miculescu said. “Access to culture is not only a question of institutions or infrastructure. It is also about visibility, openness and the profound sense that everyone has a place in the cultural life of a community.”

She also placed the discussion within UNESCO’s broader vision of culture as a global public good. Culture, she said, is “not a luxury, but a vital force through which societies build trust, resilience and social cohesion.”

The policy challenge, then, is not only to value public space as a setting for culture, but to create the conditions that allow artistic life to flourish within it. Artists, she emphasized, need more than visibility and applause.

“They need recognition, mobility, fair working conditions, freedom of expression, access to spaces, and technical support,” she said.

Romania’s difficult path to recognition

If Miculescu offered the broader framework, Iulia Popovici brought the discussion directly into the Romanian policy landscape. Commissioned to write a paper on the state of the sector, she described a system defined by precarious timing, insufficient budgets and weak institutional understanding.

“The financing of culture in Romania clearly does not have access to the whole not-so-cheerful but very resilient context on which the recommendations are based,” she said.

In Romania, she explained, independent culture is still young compared to Western systems, while project-based financing remains fragile. Budgets are small, timelines are compressed, and contracts are often signed late in the year for projects that must be implemented before the end of the fiscal calendar.

Cultural organizations may receive contracts in July for activities that must take place by the end of November. Even in an optimistic year, when the state budget is adopted earlier, organizations may only have a few months to implement complex cultural projects.

“Imagine that at the moment you plan a project, you do not know if you have to splash all the money in four months or you will be the lucky one to have eight months,” Popovici said.

The difficulty is even greater for outdoor arts, which often lack ticket revenues and have limited access to sponsorship. In Romania, she argued, there is also a strong bias toward “high culture” and “high art.” If comedy still struggles for artistic legitimacy, she suggested, outdoor arts face an even steeper challenge.

Another major issue is access to public space. Popovici avoided calling it simply “public space,” because, as she put it, “it is not so public.” The permitting system for cultural events in public space, from concerts and festivals to film shoots and street theatre, is deeply fragmented.

Her recommendations were practical. First, Romania needs a dialogue structure that brings together producers and decision-makers in order to build a better understanding of outdoor performing arts. This should lead to a good practices manual available to organizers, local administrations and other stakeholders.

Second, she called for a simplified “one-stop service” for permits related to cultural events in public space. Even cities with a high concentration of outdoor events often lack a unified system.

Third, she emphasized investment in outdoor cultural infrastructure and dedicated pilot grant programmes for outdoor performances, designed around the specific realities of the field: limited revenues, limited sponsorship, broader public benefit and complex access to space.

Recognition can be won and lost

In the final part of the conversation, the panel turned to examples from other countries, asking what recognition looks like when it moves from advocacy into policy.

Rachel Clare pointed to the importance of mobility, collaboration and European exchange. Despite the impact of Brexit on the United Kingdom, she said, “mobility across borders has really led to recognition.” Schemes such as CircusNext, as well as European Capitals of Culture and later Cities of Culture, helped street arts and circus become accepted as essential parts of the cultural landscape.

“It is not just about the fiscal element,” she said. “It is also about accepting that street arts and circus are really an essential part.”

Antonia Kuzmanić offered a concrete example from Croatia. In 2023, when Circostrada held its General Meeting in Croatia, the sector used the momentum to gather policymakers in one room and speak directly about recognition, infrastructure, education and visibility. A month later, the Ministry of Culture invited them to a meeting.

“They asked us: okay, we hear you, what do you need?” Kuzmanić recalled.

The sector asked for a dedicated budget, a bigger budget, a person who understands contemporary circus and outdoor arts, opportunities for Croatian artists to study abroad, and a longer production period. Before that, contemporary circus and outdoor arts had been placed in a broad category of “innovative art projects”, sharing limited resources with everything that did not fit theatre, opera, dance or visual arts.

Three years later, the circus has its own place in a grant scheme, even if it is currently grouped with contemporary dance. There are scholarships for Croatian artists enrolling in formal circus schools abroad, including support for living costs. There is also a prolonged production phase: one year for research, followed by one year for production.

The next problem, Kuzmanić said, is what happens when these young artists return. “How to bring these young artists back and what to offer them — this is the next level of problem.”

Bruno Costa described a similar struggle in Portugal. Outdoor Arts Portugal was created in 2017 to support the development of the sector. Through meetings, lobbying and work with the Ministry of Culture, outdoor arts and circuses were eventually recognized as contemporary art forms eligible for support.

But recognition proved fragile. In 2021, during a revision of the law, outdoor arts were almost removed from the support system after pressure from major theatre programmers. The sector had to reorganize, write letters and defend the category again.

Costa’s conclusion was clear: “If you get recognition, never close your eyes, because something can happen next time.”

The plenary ended where it began: with the question of how outdoor arts and circuses can move from visibility to recognition, and from recognition to durable cultural policy.

Ambassador Miculescu returned to the UNESCO framework, but also to a more personal optimism. The next step, she said, is to recognize outdoor arts and circuses more clearly as platforms that give vitality and accessibility to cultural diversity.

“The strongest argument for investing in outdoor arts and circuses is that they make cultural diversity accessible and shared,” she said.

They reach audiences who may not go to museums, theatres or formal cultural institutions. They bring urban culture to different generations, social backgrounds and communities. They transform public space into a place where artistic languages, cultural references and creative traditions can meet diverse audiences.

In this sense, the plenary did not treat outdoor arts as a decorative addition to cultural life. It treated them as a test for cultural democracy itself.

If culture is a public good, then public space must be more than a logistical problem. It must become a cultural commons. And if outdoor arts are among the most direct ways of making culture visible, accessible and shared, then their place in policy can no longer remain marginal.