Programme
Programme
Programme
Programme
Beyond the Obvious - Cultural Agora, Rome 2017
<Glimpses of ctrl+shift HUMAN #BtO2018 Edition >
PROMOTING DIFFERENT EXPRESSIONS AND FORMS OF PARTICIPATION
A selection of public, private or community projects and good practices, in order to highlight various ways of exercising cultural rights
Hybrid meeting, creation and debate space for young people
Harrotu ileak is a long-term project proposed as a collaboration space between young people, the Tabakalera International Centre of Contemporary Culture and several artists. It is defined as a hybrid meeting, creation and discussion point held on Fridays and which has become a benchmark for many young people from Donostia living in precarious circumstances.
In the creation processes carried out at Harrotu ileak for producing a photographic exhibition, videoclip or stage piece, social-justice issues in the public sphere, stereotypes and stigmas linked to the bodies living in the margins and which fail to tally with the community hegemony have been questioned. It is in this framework that one of the main training periods has been to detect a lack of non-Western references in the city’s cultural institutions.
The project covers three types of needs: it is a safe and peaceful space for building relations through feelings; it contributes artistic training for collectively building other imageries and expressions, giving dialogue and visibility to the cultural diversity we are living together in; and it encourages the group's diversification and opening up to young people with different characteristics.
Fertile ground of cultural initiatives in the field
The main goal behind Culturarios is to establish artistic mediation as a key piece of the cultural policies, programmes and projects that are implemented in the State’s rural environment. This is why it attempts to contribute new models for managing and creating culture in the field, providing the means for accessing and producing them through collective knowledge and by encouraging relations between residents, cultural agents and institutions.
Culturarios involves research into artistic mediation. As part of the process, the State is divided into eight areas where a study is undertaken of the projects being carried out there. The result is the publication of Geografías Culturales and the collaborative documentary Red difusa, created among more than 30 cultural agents from across Spain aiming to generate a take on rural areas and coexistence with their projects.
Culturarios (Fertile ground of cultural initiatives in the field) is an El Cubo Verde-Xarxa d'Espais d'Art al Camp project, with financial support from the Daniel i Nina Carasso Foundation.
Rap, awareness and community
Impuls de barri is a project aimed at raising social awareness and community links. It does so through a musical creation process using rap which requires social research, reflection and the creation of links between the young person taking part and the neighbourhood's residents.
The young person’s attention is caught through an artistic and performative action, thus generating an initial link. From here on, a public presentation is made in the neighbourhood and a weekly work routine established which combines group sessions, interviews with community agents, sound recordings to generate bases, music productions and, finally, stagings. At the same time, the project steadily becomes part of the local community fabric and its work spaces, to contribute to the area's cultural revitalisation, with the aim of the task being finished as the young participants themselves gradually assume responsibility for it.
Impuls de barri is a co-production between the Llobregat Block Party Cultural Association and the IGOP-UAB. A pilot experience is under way in the Can Sant Joan neighbourhood, in Montcada i Reixac, with support from the Can Sant Joan Community Board and loaned use of spaces from the City Council.
An initiative for combating the stigma of being homeless through artistic practice
Creative Home(less) helps the homeless through art. The initiative offers art therapy to the residents of the Panevezys shelter, in Lithuania, to liberate them from the complexes of being homeless and encourage them to open up and reclaim their independence.
Creative Home(less) has seen 23 homeless participants get involved since February 2022, all of whom underwent fourteen hours of art therapy and worked in small groups of five or six people. The classes were given in several places, including the Local History Museum, the Panevėžys Photo Gallery and the Panevėžys Art Gallery. The sessions ended with a final group workshop and the opening of a public exhibition.
After the project, four participants found work and another four moved out of the shelter to a municipal independent-life residence, a preliminary step towards full independence. Other participants, in addition, were positive about continuing their visits to the city's cultural spaces and took part in similar activities.
Creative Home(less) is a Panevezys municipal authority project enshrined in The Art of Staying Healthy of the NDPHS, the NDPC and the EUNIC, and jointly funded by the European Commission.
A channel for accessing the Poble-sec neighbourhood's culture and community life
The Gresol cultural programme promotes joint work between the cultural facilities, organisations and schools in Barcelona's Poble-sec, by jointly carrying out unique, long-term projects integrated into the academic curriculum.
By starting from a community approach and promoting dialogue between cultures, work involves harnessing the potential that the area offers, through the resources of their facilities, organisations, collectives and agents generating different forms of expression and ways of interacting with the environment. The projects’ central agents are children and young people working from participatory methodologies through art and culture.
The Gresol cultural’s final goal is to ensure that students and their families are connected to the neighbourhood's cultural life. An initiative that has been established as a tool for overcoming inequalities in access to culture and community life.
Performing arts and space for co-existence
Diversorium seeks to create an intersectional festival space for all bodies, combining performance, music and dancing. A space for learning and unlearning the numerous possibilities of existing and being with the other.
A transcultural initiative for personal and emotional growth through the school year
Flaskepost til fremtiden (“Message for the future” in Danish) proposes a different start to the school year that provides teachers, students and their families with a common transcultural reference tool, for the personal and emotional growth of children in the context of their learning community.
The idea was developed by the World Music Centre, the Aarhus Music School (Denmark), an extracurricular project in place since 1999. A team of eight musicians, representatives of the cultural heritage of the largest European migrant populations, teach music and dance at state schools in Aarhus.
The initiative is an integrated solution through cooperation between art and culture schools, municipal schools and the Department of Family and Assistance. This is offered at state schools as a five-week course that includes one hour of class a week and online work for broadening knowledge.
Flaskepost til fremtiden has been tested and implemented in more than fifty Aarhus classes, with over 20,000 students having been able to benefit from the initiative.
Designing and assessing an art intervention in Barcelona's museums for lonely elderly people
ArtGran aims to reduce undesired feelings of loneliness among the elderly through an intervention in several of Barcelona’s museums and cultural centres.
Six Barcelona neighbourhoods with different social and economic realities have been selected for the project and each has been assigned a museum or cultural centre. Contact has been made, through several players and facilities in each neighbourhood, with individuals over the age of seventy suffering from unwanted feelings of loneliness but capable of taking part in the action and who will spend ten weeks visiting the corresponding museum to carry out activities designed to get them to chat to one another, empower themselves, acquire knowledge and enjoy themselves through art.
An assessment will be carried out afterwards through a quasi pre- and post-experience study with an intervention group and a comparison group from each neighbourhood. Three variables are to be studied through surveys and questionnaires: loneliness, perceptions of health and mental health. An analysis will also be performed of the mechanisms that art has enabled these individuals to experience changes through. In addition, the intervention itself and its methodology will be assessed to improve future results and implement it as a service for public-health officers, Primary Health Care Centres (CAPs) and social services.
Promoting culture as a social-transformation tool generating educational opportunities and against school segregation
A project that promotes the production of collective artistic- and cultural-creation and authorship projects, with the aim of fostering emancipation in this field, feelings of community belonging and use of the Catalan language. Sambori champions culture as a social-transformation tool generating educational opportunities and against school segregation.
Sambori aims to speak to the country’s children and youth, in particular those in more vulnerable situations, by influencing schools that are more complex and with more underprivileged contexts. Sambori helps students to find a channel for expressing their voices, creating synergies not just between the various members of the educational community but also with other organisations in their environment to create a base cultural fabric.
SAFE - SUITABLE ACCESS FOR EVERYONE - EVERYTHING IS A JOURNEY
Culture and collective work for overcoming the obstacles that disabilities bring
A collective artistic project with people living with various disabilities in Ireland. Participants are receiving support from the Irish Wheelchair Association, in Waterford, and the Deenview Day Centre. What’s more, a small group taking part through online sessions is receiving support from the Dublin's Connections Arts Centre.
SAFE is based on prior experiences and methodologies developed by participants in the Deenview project and support staff between 2017 and 2020. The experiences are centred on dialogue, common exchange processes, co-creation of art objects, shared decision-taking and co-authorship. Problematic experiences and situations of exclusion, communication barriers, language modes and access issues are investigated jointly and through social, political and cultural participation. Each group co-creates and co-documents their journey through the project.
The team recently worked with artists and a film-maker to produce a documentary that shares these experiences, for presentation at the project’s event in September 2022.
The SAFE project receives funding from the Arts Council’s Arts Participation Project Award (2022), in Ireland.
A network in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands for providing vulnerable people with access to culture and the arts.
Apropa Cultura is a network of theatres, auditoriums, museums, festivals and unique spaces in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, which provides people in vulnerable situations with access to culture and the arts to improve their quality of life.
Cultural facilities offer their regular programmes to individuals assisted by organisations and social centres, at www.apropacultura.org. Apropa Cultura’s spaces reserve 2% of their programmes’ places in these organisations and offer tickets at a maximum price of 3 euros. The network thereby dignifies the individuals and normalises their full inclusion through culture, connecting social organisations with the facilities.
The programme was created in 2006 at the Auditori, in Barcelona. It has expanded its scope of action since then and now also offers training sessions in accessibility and diversity, artistic training and activities adapted to the needs of the network’s groups. Apropa Cultura was set up in the Balearic Islands in 2021 and is expected to open up in other communities as well.
So far more than 375,000 cultural experiences offered by 145 facilities have been enjoyed by users. More than 2,500 social centres and organisations have signed up to the programme.
An initiative for protecting, accessing, creating and developing culture from a social and cross-cutting perspective
A project working to bring visibility to vulnerable collectives, prevent structural and symbolic violence and generate spaces and tools for accessing and producing culture. Starting from an intersectional and eco-pacifist feminist perspective, the project creates links between social players as a means of positioning culture as the driving force for development and sowing the seeds for creating a pacifist and transcultural society.
Protecting cultural rights is an issue addressed by the academies and institutions but unresolved in the social reality. Hence ONGD Liminal’s aim to generate community working for cultural protection, access, creation and development from cross-cutting, human-rights-promoting principles: social and community action, cultural-diversity respect and inclusion, feminism, political influence.
Adopting a dynamic and transnational focus, it aims to create multi-player-approach projects that help to link developmental cooperation to culture by bringing it closer to civil society. In addition, this will enable national and international projects to be created to promote the building of intercultural relations, weaving an international social fabric that fights jointly the problems of inequality, deprivation and injustice.