COOLsound - on-line despre scena independentă românească 2021 / COOLsound - online about the Romanian independent stage 2021 is a bilingual project launched in two stages in the summer and winter of 2021 on the platform www.coolsound.ro. The project is done by Pro Contemporania with the support of JTI, aims to support online artistic productions signed by Romanian musicians, actors, dancers, or performers in full activity - most of them young - with a representative repertoire. The productions are filmed professionally and gathered on the youtube channel procontemporania and the platform www.COOLsound.ro.

The project supposes the actual production of the materials and the "presentation sheet" of each protagonist.

The first stage of COOLsound includes 25 artists presented in bilingual posters with video, photo, and full-text content in Romanian and English, with a solo artistic moment and an interview - statement, complex multimedia presentations that are practically real business cards of theirs at the moment of 2021, accessible through the portal www.COOLsound.ro. This first stage is expected to be completed by December 2021, and the 25 artists will be joined by others in the coming years.

The first pages of the Online Dictionary of the Independent Stage in Romania include artists from the performing arts who at the time of entering the project were affected by the Covid 19 pandemic and were NOT employees of a public institution in Romania.

This situation did not prevent them from being winners of prestigious international competitions or involved in large-scale cultural projects in the country and abroad. All these names belong to artists of all ages who have opted for the status of independent artist, respectively not to be employees of a state cultural institution, but to evolve on a project basis, a status strongly affected by the pandemic.

These creators of high artistic value have gone through and some of them are still going through, extreme situations. The artists were the first to be removed from the field and the last ones were reintroduced. The period 2020-2021, by defining artistic activities as belonging to the category of non-essential ones, potentially projected the socio-professional category of the artist in a visibly disadvantaged area. Performing arts activities - including independent ones - have been shut down, with independent artists simply losing their income. Among them, there are many artists who, although they collaborated with important cultural institutions, lost their contracts, which with the resumption of the activity, in the summer of 2021, reappear only in a limited proportion. Although in Europe there are many examples of state support for these artists, and the Romanian state has found some solutions, the crisis remains major. If the authorities do not understand or do not have the necessary resources to understand that investing in the arts is a "win-win situation" and brings significant benefits in the medium and long term, the private sector can make a welcome contribution in this direction.

The arts are inclusive and can contribute to the rebirth of society as a whole. Gestures in support of artists at such times are not just important, timely help. It also means a perspective in which these people or many of them will respond "present" to other future actions, for the development of society.

www.COOLsound.ro