Feb. 24 – It’s the first time that the ECF Princess Margriet Award, established by the European Cultural Foundation, is awarded to an Italian cultural reality. On March 18, the Bozar (Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels) will welcome representatives from the occupied Teatro Valle in Rome and the Croatian activist Teodor Celakoski to honor their example of cooperation between culture and society in the battle for “public commons.” The award consists in € 50,000 and will be delivered by Princess Margriet of the Netherlands. The adventures of the occupied Teatro Valle began in June 2011, when a large number of artists and workers in the entertainment and culture scene saved Rome’s oldest theater still in business from privatization and turned it into a lasting platform of “empowerment” where artistic experimentation, political debate and the broad community meet. In September 2013, the “Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune” was established thanks to leading jurists such as Stefano Rodotà, Ugo Mattei and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom.
