Roman Higher Artistic Education Erasmus Consortium Body Sound DiVision (BsdV) was born from the desire to establish a network of Higher Artistic Education, exquisitely Roman, albeit of national importance and depth, which can act internationally as an interconnected entity established for the purpose of implementing European and extra-European Erasmus mobility projects. The name, chosen by mutual agreement, wants to represent in a simple and direct way the areas of action in which the consortium institutes intend to move – Dance, Music, Design, Fine Arts/Cinema – underlining the primary focus of the Consortium itself, multidisciplinarity. Body Sound DiVision is made up of 4 Higher Artistic Education Institutes, authorized by the Ministry of Education to issue 1st and 2nd cycle academic qualifications, all based in Rome and each representative of the highest excellence in their discipline:

• Saint Louis College of Music (SLMC), AFAM Institute, active on the national territory since 1976, the first private institution authorized for the release of first and second level academic qualifications in Jazz & Popular Music, Composition and Film Music, Sound Technician , Electronic music, Music applied to images, Song-writing, Coordinator of the Consortium;
• National Academy of Dance (AND), the only state institute in Italy that issues first and second level academic qualifications equivalent to university degrees for teaching dance;
• ISIA Roma Design (ISIA) – Higher Institute for Artistic Industries – AFAM Institute of forty years of activity, structurally based on research and experimentation, strong in cultural heritage and a unique scientific and educational experience in Italy;
• Rome University of Fine Arts (RUFA),  is a multidisciplinary, international higher education Institution – legally recognized by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) – that offers accredited and innovative courses in the field of Arts, Design, Visual Communication, Audiovisual, Fashion, Game, and Media Arts.

To date, the Italian Higher Education Institutes place themselves and interface with their foreign partners as single and fragmented units, often confronting themselves with Institutes within which the various arts coexist and communicate harmoniously and prolifically, such as the “Poles Superieurs” French and the “Universities of Applied Sciences” of Northern Europe. This takes place in a context in which the individual institutes have as their individual target the student’s professionalization, a process that cannot occur in the absence of practical and direct application of learning and application in the field: the music composer must be able to compose music for a dance show or for an advertisement, just as a dancer must be able to have music to dance and a designer must be able to experiment with new technologies in an enlarged artistic field and everyone must be able to collaborate in concrete artistic projects and with specific cultural, social or market. This is both an artistic and didactic gap that Body Sound DiVision aims to fill, placing itself externally with an expanded force, for example towards prestigious foreign institutes and entities, where the single AFAM Institute would not be able to arouse a sufficient design appeal. With Body Sound DiVision, new spaces and perspectives open up for the three prestigious Institutes to expand their activities internationally: – possibility to create multidisciplinary Erasmus mobility projects and to increase the number and quality of the flows of students entering and leaving the individual institutes; – sharing successful partnerships with Institutes that encompass the various “arts”, and being able to carry out far more far-reaching projects with them and initiate new partnerships with prestigious international Institutes that have not yet opened up to individual institutions; – maximize and speed up the internationalization process of individual institutions and exchange good practices among the members of the Consortium in terms of the implementation of Erasmus Projects; – encourage interdisciplinary dialogue with foreign institutes, where the different disciplines are not already coexistent in the curricula of the institute, encouraging dialogue with local businesses. As a starting point, Body Sound DiVision aims to carry out Erasmus projects for individual mobility, both European and non-European, involving students, post-graduate trainees and staff of the three Institutes, selecting foreign partners among the most inclined ones to the approach multidisciplinary and already partner of the individual Institutes of the Consortium. Rome is a city in itself that arouses a strong attraction in terms of international incoming mobility, yet often still today the participant in mobility chooses the capital for reasons more of tourist attraction than cultural and training ones. The Body Sound DiVision Consortium was created precisely to generate a wider impact in terms of attractiveness of the educational offer in the sector, with the aim of being able to show itself more strongly abroad, also revealing to international partners hitherto inaccessible, and therefore to their students and teachers, the real excellence of curricula, training courses and proactivity in the field of international cooperation. And, succeeding in the enterprise, the same impact is expected at the national level, where Rome manages to position itself as a cultural capital. The artistic products that will be born thanks to the joint efforts of the 3 Institutes and their excellent sector expertise in the context of the international projects undertaken, will be able to place themselves in a high-level professional market, both national and international, maximizing the visibility of the excellence in question. at every level and consequently increasing the esteem and visibility of the Institutes, multiplying their attractiveness, even towards the foreign public. The best artistic products born within the activities of Body Sound DiVision – in terms of shows, new artistic teams and also innovative teaching methods – will certainly be extrapolated from the context to proceed to a real artistic production at national and international level, putting the skills and production means of the three partner institutes of the Consortium are available, such as record labels, management and booking agencies, publishing series and so on.