Photo taken at Creative Skills Week 2025 by Štěpán Filip.

From 29 September to 1 October, Barcelona hosted the UNESCO World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development, MONDIACULT 2025, the world’s biggest cultural policy conference. The conference brought together 194 UNESCO Member States and thousands of participants to chart the future of culture in a changing world.  

 

MONDIACULT 2025 consisted of intergovernmental plenary sessions, thematic technical debates, side events, and exhibitions. 

 

ELIA proudly contributed to this gathering through two programmes featured in the MONDIACULT 2025 Extended Programme, “Towards MONDIACULT 2025”: Creative Skills Week 2025 and the ART/IN Forum: Artistic Intelligence – Shoring Up Resourceful and Resilient Cultures.  

 

We also followed three key UNESCO releases redefining how culture is understood and measured: the Global Report on the State of Culture, the 2025 UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics (FCS), and the UNESCO Framework for Culture and Arts Education: Implementation Framework. 

 

Read below ELIA's notes. 

 

 

 

Held from 22 to 26 September in Prague and online, Creative Skills Week 2025 (CSW2025) and led and curated by ELIA in partnership with Creative Prague. The programme was part of UNESCO’s official MONDIACULT 2025 Extended Programme.  

 

CSW2025 brought together educators, policymakers, sector leaders, artists, students, and learners of all kinds to collaborate across boundaries, co-create new learning pathways (CYANOTYPES Framework), and build skills for a resilient, future-ready sector.  

 

Co-organised with EIT Culture & Creativity, the Creative Pact for Skills, SACCORD, and CYANOTYPES, the event addressed the urgent transitions facing our sector: digital advancements, the green shift, funding cuts, growing concerns on the implications of AI, the rise of populism, and skills shortages. 

 

Its inclusion in MONDIACULT 2025 highlights ELIA's joint work on skills development in the cultural and creative sectors and aligns with UNESCO’s global policy framework. 

 

 

 

In this context of renewed global momentum, the online ART/IN Forum, which was held as a side-event and themed “Artistic Intelligence: Shoring Up Resourceful and Resilient Cultures”, brought together artists, educators and cultural leaders to explore how creative thinking, practice and collaboration can serve as engines for systemic change. 

 

Gathering 50 participants from cultural institutions, universities, and international organisations, the Forum was facilitated by experts from the Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence, Hanze University, and the Human Performance Research Lab including Maria Hansen, ELIA Executive Director, and Jørn Mortensen, ELIA Vice President and Strategic Supervisor at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences. 

 

Participants exchanged ideas in breakout sessions around four questions on artistic intelligence: how does it reshape collaboration across sectors; where is it being practiced globally; how can leaders mobilise it for public benefit; and how does it protect the sacred and social value of culture. Each session invited participants to reflect on lived examples, revealing artistic intelligence as both a practice and a philosophy, one that connects creative, civic, and spiritual dimensions of human experience. 

 

In the session led by Maria Hansen and Jørn Mortensen, the conversation turned to leadership and recognition. Participants debated how to make the value of artistic intelligence legible to policymakers. Maria reflected: “Evidence always helps, but leaders with an artistic background bring a different mode of thinking; one rooted in experience, empathy and collaboration.” Others argued that impact need not always be quantified and that, perhaps, different strategies should be explored, with an openness to improvising rather than repeating what has already been done in the past.  

 

This discussion echoed MONDIACULT’s broader call for innovation in how societies evaluate cultural contributions. As UNESCO’s Implementation Guidance states, “creative learning and artistic experimentation are valid forms of knowledge creation in themselves”. 

 

Across all sessions, one idea remained in that “art can open up empty space where change can happen more easily”. This insight captured how artistic processes can facilitate dialogue, empathy, and systems transformation. The event showed how artistic intelligence can reframe leadership, renew institutions, and strengthen communities. It also illustrated the collective power of dialogue, and that policy frameworks gain meaning only when interpreted through practice. All these notes were gathered from the ART/IN Forum's shared document and event report. 

 

Global Report on the State of Culture 

 

During MONDIACULT 2025, a key deliverable was launched: the first globally comprehensive “Global Report on the State of Culture”. This was the result of three years of work, informed by regional consultations and national data, designed to provide fresh evidence, figures and analysis across heritage, creativity, education, and policy. Concurrently, MONDIACULT 2025 reaffirmed six priority domains: Cultural Rights, Digital Technologies in the Culture Sector, Culture and Education, Economy of Culture, Culture and Climate Action, Culture, Heritage and Crisis, along with two focus areas: Culture for Peace, and Artificial Intelligence and Culture. Access this report here. 

 

UNESCO Framework for Culture and Arts Education: Implementation Guidance  

 

Following the publication of the UNESCO Framework for Culture and Arts Education in 2024, UNESCO now launched its implementation guidance. The guidance document builds on the key objective, goals and strategic goals of the Framework, to help policymakers and practitioners to effectively support culture and arts education ecosystems and build recognition among society and stakeholders of the value of culture and arts education. It includes a variety of implementation tools, including recommendations for policymakers, tips for practitioners, and inspiring examples of initiatives from across the world.  

 

 

MONDIACULT 2025 also saw the launch of the updated UNESCO Framework for Cultural Statistics, a key tool for rethinking how we understand and measure culture’s social and economic contributions. It provides statistical methodology for ministries of culture, national statistical offices, researchers (academia), and the private sector in producing cultural statistics. It enables the measurement of a wide range of cultural expressions irrespective of the economic and social mode of their production and supports the production of harmonised and comparable data for both national and international purposes using international classifications.  

This framework aims to equip cultural stakeholders with a standardised statistical methodology to support evidence-based policy, research, and advocacy for culture. 

 

Find all the resources and outcomes mentioned in this article: