Aware of the need to redefine the meaning of artistic practices in our societies and concretely embodying the grand ambitions of the New European Bauhaus (NEB), the six partners from five European countries united in Transformative Territories: Performing Transition through the Arts explore and experiment, through their unique and pioneering cultural sites, with collective processes to make peace with the Earth. These new learning and transmission spaces across territories contribute daily to inventing new resilient and inclusive cultural models. They notably serve as true laboratories for experimentation and learning in what we call transformative artistic practices.
Driven by a new generation of artists, these artistic practices, stemming from collective and participatory processes and transdisciplinary approaches, vary the registers, modes of attention, and ways of involving other entities to reconfigure how we inhabit the Earth. They constitute genuine culture-based solutions for the ecological transition of territories. Through transnational research-creation, collective key moments, the support of a scientific committee, the creation of methodological tools, and dissemination, Transformative Territories aims to highlight the innovation laboratories that these sites represent and the potential of their practices.
The objectives are to enhance the circulation of artists, works, and methodologies within this emerging field of transformative artistic practices, to strengthen the capacities of these places and the artists they support through the development of innovative pedagogies and the structuring of an expanded network, to establish a true platform for exchange and mutual support among these organizations, and to disseminate their specific know-how and potential to the entire cultural sector and more broadly to other sectors involved in ecological transition, serving the sustainable transformation of territories and our ways of inhabiting them.
Transformative Territories is a transdisciplinary European cooperation project to
develop and link a community of cultural actors that act for ecology across
Europe. The project is implemented by six leading European players in the field of
art, ecology and territories: Zone Sensible (France), Campo Adentro (Spain), ArtMill
(Czech Republic), Tavros (Greece), the ITM – Instituto Terra e Memoria (Portugal),
under the coordination of a key player in the art and ecology scene: COAL (France)
and in conjunction with institutional partners and with the scientific supervision of
LADYSS-CNRS and Institut Michel Serre.
These partners have long worked for an alliance of art and sustainable development, and are driven by the ambition to have a lasting influence on cultural policies at European level. All are recognized facilitators of this dialogue between the arts, territories and citizens for culture-based solutions in the field of territorial transformation.
COAL, the Coalition for Art and Sustainable Development, was founded in 2008 by a group of French professionals working in the fields of contemporary art, sustainable development and research in order to promote the emergence of a culture of
ecology.
In a multidisciplinary and innovative way, COAL mobilises artists and cultural actors on societal and environmental problematics, in collaboration with institutions, NGOs, scientists and enterprises and supports the important role of creation and culture in raising awareness and in the implementation of concrete solutions.
Read more at the partner´s website here
The artistic collective Parti Poétique, founded by Olivier Darné, has been developing since 2003 art and environment projects in France and Europe, by putting their bees and their questions into the public space. In view of the creation of an “Academy of Life” in Saint-Denis, the collective has since 2017 been running Zone Sensible – the Art and Food Production Center project, which articulates cultural, artistic and participative programming around the three themes of Nature, Culture and Food.
Read more at the partner´s website here
INLAND is an arts collective, dedicated to agricultural, social and cultural production, and a collaborative agency. It was started in 2009 by Fernando Garcia Dory as a project about an organization that engages territories, culture, and social change. During its first stage (2010-2013) and taking Spain as initial case study, INLAND comprised an international conference, artistic production with 22 artists in residence in the same number of villages across the country, and nationwide exhibitions and presentations.
This was followed by a period of reflection and evaluation, launching study groups on art & ecology, and series of publications. Today INLAND functions as a collective and works as a para-institution to open space for land-based collaborations, economies and communities-of-practice as a substrate for post-Contemporary Art cultural forms. Appearing in different forms in different countries, whilst dissolving individual agency in the collective, INLAND publishes books, produces shows, and makes cheese. It also advises as a consultant for the European Union Commission on the use of art for rural development policies while facilitating a shepherd and nomadic peoples movements, runs a space in Madrid city named Centre for the Approach of the Rural and is recovering an abandoned village in an undisclosed location for collective artistic and agricultural production.
Read more at the partner´s website here
We are a non-profit organization working in sustainable education via the arts and sciences, with international outreach that ultimately has the potential to affect policy. We produce exhibitions, catalogues, educational programs, workshops and other visual manifestations to promote our goals of stewardship of the planet and social change. This takes place at our home site, ArtMill in Czech Republic, as well as project locations globally.
Our vision is to expand the definition of Art into the larger cultural context. ArtDialogue does this by fostering creativity and it’s innate connection to the natural world; a place where nature and culture meet that is holistic, experiential, and sustainable. We foster a praxis-based, educational environment that grows from the natural sciences, philosophy and civil society, the arts, and the systems that organize them
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After years of curating a constellation of projects in and around Athens, locus athens is exploring a new format: founding a home in the area of TAVROS. Our medium sized non-profit space, opening in October 2019, will be the springboard for our need to respond to the social and political circumstances around us, by exploring notions of democracy, equality and ecology whilst looking to address these issues head on through dialogue, listening and learning.
Inspired by our locality, which takes its name from a mountainous region in Turkey (Toros Dağları) from which a wave of migrants arrived and settled in the 1920’s, our program will reflect our belief in the transformative potential of shifting perspectives and moving minds and bodies through our relationship with art.
Read more at the partner´s website here
The Terra e Memoria Institute (ITM) provides, through the valorisation of our memorial heritage, cultural responses to social, cultural and environmental issues. Based in Maçao, a village with low population density located in a rural area of Portugal, ITM is a national reference structure for advice in archeology, cultural heritage management and integrated land management, with an important intercontinental network of partners for development and innovation.
The Laboratory of Social dynamics and spatial reconstruction (LADYSS) is a multidisciplinary UMR (Mixed Research Unit) located in 4 french university sites. The LADYSS is set to analyse territorialisation processes of both individual and collective actions broken down into a study of a world-system and day-to-day existence composed of local issues, via research objects that are especially representative of the transformation of contemporary societies, such as those of the environment. This reaffirmation was grounded in a solid methodological basis : interdisciplinarity figures among LADYSS researchers’ key preoccupations and is one of its members’ identifying markers. Consequently, those conducting research into the importance of
territorialisation in processes of change have much to say to stakeholders on the ground about how they fit into the wider scheme of things.
Read more at the parter´s website heren
The Michel Serres Institute aims to establish the principles on which to base public institutions for an equitable transition to an ecologically and socially inclusive society. The Michel Serres Institute is first and foremost a living school that promotes situated knowledge, the result of listening to and cooperating with all players in society.
