Art can strengthen emotional resilience, resilience and cohesion in a crisis. This is the thinking in North Savo, where Savonia University of Applied Sciences and Kuopio Art Museum are launching a project on art without barriers. The project will create and use new types of art services to promote inclusion, well-being and non-discrimination.

The project’s wallless approach means that the art museum wants to become more open, accessible and inclusive. The art museum will become a place of empowerment for young people and other target groups, as well as a social platform. Some of the museum’s activities will also take place outside its walls.

The project, called “Art without Barriers – Inclusiveness through Art”, involves, among others, a new kind of cooperation with Niuvanniemi Hospital.

– Forensic psychiatric patients have experienced severe traumas that are extremely difficult to work through. Art plays an important role in starting the recovery process, helping to deal with difficult memories and experiences. We are grateful for the opportunity to take art to places where it has been difficult to experience it,” says Olavi Louhenranta, a psychotherapist and counsellor at Niuvanniemi Hospital.

Inclusive and accessible art activities

Savonia UAS and Kuopio Art Museum are working together to develop more participatory and accessible activities using art-based methods. This will include experiments in low-threshold art activities based on customers and their needs, as well as new types of coaching and training activities.

The project will create a customer-oriented and tested multidisciplinary service model to deliver a new kind of arts activity for young people and other target groups who are currently excluded from cultural activities.

– There is a need to create a service model for art and multidisciplinary activities in North Savo, as young people, those who have moved to other parts of the city and the socially disadvantaged are generally not reached through cultural services, say Anna Vilkuna, Director of the Kuopio Art Museum, and Raisa Leinonen, RDI expert at Savonia, who initiated the project.

– The project will first be tested in Kuopio, from where it will be rolled out more widely to North Savo and other art institutions. The underlying idea is to work together to prepare for a time when resources may be smaller than today but the needs for promoting well-being are greater. That is why we have also established extensive contacts with other projects,” Vilkuna and Leinonen say.

The Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment will fund the project until early 2027 with around €400 000 from the European Social Fund.