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Em Casa, CRUA © Cultura em Expansão / Renato Cruz Santos
Applications are open until 28 February for the next edition of Cultura em Expansão (Culture in Expansion), the free cultural and artistic promotion programme run by the municipality of Porto, which has now run for 10 editions. The programme, which until now concentrated on four specific territories, despite also having a satellite programme, has changed its format and wants to open up more to the city. The next edition starts in April.
Agenda Porto spoke to Rui Silvestre, Director of Convergências at Ágora - Cultura e Desporto, who since September has been in charge of the cultural management of the Matadouro (which is due to open next year), and who has now taken Cultura em Expansão under his wing.
Since 2014, Cultura em Expansão has been consolidating itself as a project for cultural democratisation in the city of Porto. How do you think this programme reinforces the mission of cohesion and social transformation through arts and culture?
With the call for proposals, we're trying to open up the programme to the participation of more voices, more communities, more territories, more practices, more agents, who thus translate the reality of the city. It is in this broadening that the mission of cohesion and social transformation is strengthened.
Rui Silvestre © Inês Aleixo
Under this call, the programme can host up to two dozen projects to be developed in the city - six community co-creation projects and 14 participatory creation projects. How do these projects differ?
Firstly, to clarify that the two programmes cover creation in socially committed artistic practices in all forms of contemporary artistic expression, namely visual arts and curating, performing and stage arts, music composition and performance, literature, critical thinking and publishing, video art, moving image and cinematic art, architecture, urbanism and public space.
They differ above all in the degree of involvement and relationship with communities, with the six co-creation projects aiming to promote the collaborative creation of artists and/or cultural agents in conjunction with a particular community or target group (social, professional, territorial), sharing artistic responsibility in the construction of the creative process and realising a common goal that is collectively transformative. In this case, we ask that projects take place over a continuous period of at least six months and consider at least two intermediate moments of public presentation.
The aim of the 14 participatory creation projects is to encourage individual or collective artistic creations to be carried out in a participatory way, with the local population invited to take part in the process and contribute to the materialisation of the results. The project can be generated from the identity, memory, heritage or circumstances of the community to which it relates.
Brado © Cultura em Expansão / Renato Cruz Santos
The Matadouro, as the city's new cultural centre, will house different artistic and community dimensions. Which effect do you hope this structure will have on Porto's cultural and social dynamics, especially in decentralised areas? Will this also be a privileged space to host Cultura em Expansão projects?
The opening of the new cultural centre in Matadouro and, with it, all the programming dynamics that will be generated from the various facilities that are part of it, will necessarily contribute to the creation of a new centrality in Campanhã. This centrality is not only created by itself, but also with the rest of the social, cultural and economic fabric that already exists, or that will emerge with the Matadouro, and also with the infrastructures that facilitate mobility, such as the Metro Station and the Terminal Intermodal Campanhã, for example. Taking these factors into account, we want to be a relevant contribution to working closely with the different communities and structures in this part of the city, schools for example, and contribute to greater cohesion, social integration and local development.
The availability of the Matadouro's spaces for community and educational artistic practices will encourage the development of programmes that contribute to social transformation and local development, valuing the artistic communities of Campanhã and the eastern part of Porto, combating inequalities and contributing to the reduction of social exclusion. We hope to present projects from Cultura em Expansão, but also from other programmes, in the context of artistic practices that promote integration and social cohesion.
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