Žilina, Bielsko-Biała, and Frýdek-Místek are typical examples of cities that developed along with their respective industries. Industrial production has been a fertile ground for a particular culture, one that consists of both tangible and intangible assets: factories as the foundation of new urban structures; crafts, engineering, and entrepreneurial skills as a source of social and economic capital. Specific mindsets, loyalties, and attitudes co-create the social fabric and everyday life in industrial regions, even if their people are often not aware of it. The Future Factory programme pillar focuses on craft, artistic production, the industrial and technical heritage of the Beskids region and the connection between art and science.

No matter which direction you take from our cities, you quickly reach nature and beautiful mountains. In this programme pillar, we merge thematic focus on environmental issues with artistic creation and pay cultural tribute to the surrounding Beskids. Through deconcentrating our programme, spreading the events over a large territory and bringing them to remote areas, we will engage natural landscapes and dozens of small towns and villages in the ECoC programme, so that they also can be a part of the European dialogue. We will offer visitors from all over Europe the experience of the wilderness of Beskid forests and mountains, and opportunities to embark on a journey of art and adventure into themselves and the region’s identity. We will explore traditional culture and inspire its contemporary reinterpretation. We will be as well addressing conflicting environmental and economic interests, and critically reconsider the relationship between humans and nature; the tension between the urges to protect and master it. We will be focusing on the issue of climate change and support adaptation techniques through better care of urban greenery and water management.

If culture is one of the forming elements of our identities – whether national, regional, or local – the societal role of art is to challenge those identities and to put our history in perspective. We see the ECoC title as an opportunity to better understand that past, to confront the taboos lingering in our collective unconscious, especially those related to the region’s role in WW2 and subsequent nationalisms, and turn them into a force of construction, rather than destruction. Yet, we do not want to get stuck in the past. We see the title, first and foremost, as an opportunity to use art to imagine a different kind of world, through art, challenging established narratives and envisaging new ones. We also want to reflect Žilina’s long-standing identity as a transportation hub, and drive European mobility and intercultural oo dialogue throughout the ECoC process. We think that such dialogue is the essence of all transportation and mobility, not just their accidental byproduct. Our programme is a celebration of that dialogue. In our program, we also focus on these topics, and we feel an urgency to explore this freedom in any artistic or journalistic expression, and to become a European centre for debate on the freedom to speak and create, whether in art or in the media.