[Re]Thinking the city collectively: active listening of invisible (and inaudible) dynamics
[Re]Thinking the city emerges as a project developed at the intersection of art and activism, based on our investigations with the inhabitants of Coimbra, started in 2020, about the main problems of the city. Our proposal is to transform this study into performative acts that allow us to bring attention to the problems and solutions from the citizens’ point of view. We want to create a score that will allow, through artistic practices, civil society to have a voice that can be heard differently.
Local
Portugal
Portugal: Coimbra, Bruscos, Condeixa
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
As individual(s) in partnership with organisation(s)
First name: Sofia Last name: Dias Gender: Other Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Linha de Fuga is a non-profit organisation founded in 2018. Based in Coimbra, it's an artistic programming and diffusion structure that aims to be an active agent in the development of critical discourses between art, culture, politics, education and society together with various local and international agents.
CES (Centro de Estudos Cociais da Universidade de Coimbra) is a scientific institution dedicated to research and advanced training in the social sciences and humanities, through an inter and transdisciplinary approach.
Rádio Baixa is a community radio in Coimbra's downtown.
RUC (Rádio Universidade de Coimbra) is a cultural section of Coimbra's University Academic Association. As a radio school, it organizes annually technical courses in broadcasting, journalism and programming.
Milvoz Milvoz is an Association of Nature Protection and Conservation created by a group of citizens who want to give voice, represent and preserve the natural heritage of the region of Coimbra; In addition to the objective of valuing and protecting areas of ecological value, they intend to expand these areas through the creation of a network of Bio-Reserves in areas of rich biodiversity and native forest. Age: 25 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Portugal Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Rua São Francisco, lote 13, nº8, res/c esquerdo Town: Coimbra Postal code: 3040-321 Country: Portugal Direct Tel:+351 933 028 197 E-mail:sofiadiasaaaa@gmail.com Website:https://www.behance.net/sofiadias7
First name: Pedro Last name: Cosme Gender: Male Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Linha de Fuga is a non-profit organisation founded in 2018. Based in Coimbra, it's an artistic programming and diffusion structure that aims to be an active agent in the development of critical discourses between art, culture, politics, education and society together with various local and international agents.
CES (Centro de Estudos Cociais da Universidade de Coimbra) is a scientific institution dedicated to research and advanced training in the social sciences and humanities, through an inter and transdisciplinary approach.
Rádio Baixa is a community radio in Coimbra's downtown.
RUC (Rádio Universidade de Coimbra) is a cultural section of Coimbra's University Academic Association. As a radio school, it organizes annually technical courses in broadcasting, journalism and programming.
Milvoz Milvoz is an Association of Nature Protection and Conservation created by a group of citizens who want to give voice, represent and preserve the natural heritage of the region of Coimbra; In addition to the objective of valuing and protecting areas of ecological value, they intend to expand these areas through the creation of a network of Bio-Reserves in areas of rich biodiversity and native forest. Age: 25 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Portugal Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Urbanização Nova Conimbriga Lote B-12 1º Esquerdo Town: Condeixa Postal code: 3150-230 Country: Portugal Direct Tel:+351 914 180 063 E-mail:pcosme97@gmail.com
First name: Catarina Last name: Silva Gender: Female Please describe the type of organization(s) you work in partnership with: Linha de Fuga is a non-profit organisation founded in 2018. Based in Coimbra, it's an artistic programming and diffusion structure that aims to be an active agent in the development of critical discourses between art, culture, politics, education and society together with various local and international agents.
CES (Centro de Estudos Cociais da Universidade de Coimbra) is a scientific institution dedicated to research and advanced training in the social sciences and humanities, through an inter and transdisciplinary approach.
Rádio Baixa is a community radio in Coimbra's downtown.
RUC (Rádio Universidade de Coimbra) is a cultural section of Coimbra's University Academic Association. As a radio school, it organizes annually technical courses in broadcasting, journalism and programming.
Milvoz Milvoz is an Association of Nature Protection and Conservation created by a group of citizens who want to give voice, represent and preserve the natural heritage of the region of Coimbra; In addition to the objective of valuing and protecting areas of ecological value, they intend to expand these areas through the creation of a network of Bio-Reserves in areas of rich biodiversity and native forest. Age: 25 Please attach a copy of your national ID/residence card:
By ticking this box, I certify that the information regarding my age is factually correct. : Yes Nationality: Portugal Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Rua Padre Manuel da Nobrega 87, 1ºesquerdo Town: Coimbra Postal code: 3000-322 Country: Portugal Direct Tel:+351 915 319 964 E-mail:97catarinassilva@gmail.com Website:https://www.linkedin.com/in/catarina-santos-silva-70a204117/
“[Re]Thinking the city” is a project in the intersection of art and activism, based on the investigations about the city of Coimbra that we began in 2020, during the pandemic. As a practice of citizenship, we challenged its inhabitants to participate in a survey about different dimensions of the urban space, its problems and solutions. The results were published in a print edition. At this point, our proposal is to transform this study into performative acts. We want to access the city differently, collaborating with artists, collectives and inhabitants to create an artistic object that will include the civil society manifestations about its city. During 18 months, we will continue our research together with artists, academics and civil society to generate and analyse more content but also to define which are the most important to be translated into artistic objects and how. Parallel to the creation of an artistic dispositive, we will be thinking on ways of replicating this procedures, in order to be adapted and recontextualised to other cities or even smaller villages. This gives each population and its actors an artistic dispositive that allows for the local population to voice out problems and solutions for the territory, and to reflect, as well as the centers of power, on the performative and contents of these statements.The project will be developed in distinct phases: classification of discourses; mapping collectives and artists that can communicate and articulate discourses and forms of approach; mapping spaces that allow the activation of more voices; experimentation with artists archive, performativity and dramaturgy of the survey; public presentation of the prototype in Coimbra, in the frame of Linha de Fuga festival and construction of an archive with creative commons use and replication to other territories.
Artivism
Democracy
Inclusion
Viral agency
Affection politics
The sustainable character of the project lies in the conception of a methodological guide that is to be used locally and with local knowledge. The final product is the creation of artistic dispositives and formats, based on a strategy of surveying and analyzing information and speeches in strategically mapped points of the city where our project will be standing. Promoting these spaces to meet and share testimonies is also a mode of perception of what is missing and what should be preserved or adapted to the new way of living of each site. In the process of analyzing the speeches of the population, we will also increase the possibility of other voices, knowledges and proposals to appear and work with each site the relevancy of each problem and solution which would allow fostering the feeling of belonging. These anonymous voices will be translated to artistic dispositives, with local artists and communities which will be very easy to use: sound recording, walks, visual signalization, and performative acts. In preparing this score, we will work with artists that have a long experience in archiving, performative actions and sound so that we can define with them the best way to be adapted to the city, as well as to other environments, so that every time this project is replicated it will not need to move the original team. We will create a website with guidelines for the local situation, but keeping in mind a global view.
One of the main objectives of our curatorial proposal is to use different recreational devices for community participation in order to create a feeling of being heard, thus encouraging expression and fostering a sense of legitimacy in the construction of one’s own surroundings. The participation aspect of it allows for contexts more prone to intercultural exchanges, for a period of interknowledge to grow and it works as a method to facilitate each person to find their place in a debate, to facilitate collective reflection and to direct them towards collective action. These experiments in and with the public space intend to create new experiences and to stimulate new approaches on how we look at things, cultivating new long lasting social and cultural values, thus not neglecting the qualities of the space and the history and memory it keeps. Establishing connections to the traditions of a place and remembrance of locals, allows us to build meaningful and contextual responses that can translate in a sense of belonging.
The cultural panorama in Coimbra lacks strong ties between actors of the city and lacks diversity in cultural offer; this project will promote the creation of interchangeable networks between locals and artists, helping to redefine the power structures and cultivating the means for collective reflection.
Our project stems from an activist impulse to amplify voices that everyday life silences and makes disappear due to excessive elitist models of sociability and insertion of the community in the centers of public power of the city. We intend to understand how the different opinions of the various communities of the city can express their problems without the fear of discrimination. We believe that art is the safest way to do it. In the development of the process, we will map underrepresented voices of the city policies, such as marginalized groups for their ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical disability and low intellectual access. The mapping will be translated to defining centers of recollecting stories and depositions to incorporate the component of social action in the artistic dispositive. The discourses and experiences generated within the scope of the practical application of our curatorial model, thus seek to think collectively about the voices of the city, with the aim of raising questions directly linked to relations alluding to rhetorical and political properties in the urban space.
This is a project based on the politics of affection. Participation is the main aspect of it. It intends to discover different voices/statements that inhabit the city, their problems and their solutions in order to translate them into an artistic product with the objective of expanding and addressing these voices back to the community. The collection of these statements is intended to give participants a sense of belonging, besides a political and social ownership on a construction of artistic nature. Our project works with the idea of shared visions of the local problems but also local solutions. Taking into consideration all the ethics of this, we will need to work with the different populations so that they feel that they have a voice. That’s why it is important also to mediate the meaning of art in the process and to put the artists involved in the process in contact with these populations, maintaining the possibility of anonymity. This initiative allows a triggering in the community, new partnerships and articulations between citizens, artistic tissue, social support structures, and other agents that helps in the mediation of the desire that the community has to communicate its problems and solutions to the world, and a creation of a context for such sharing.
The dissemination of our proposal works with an eclectic selection of collectives capable of helping our group in different areas, including collaborations in the academic environment, social action associations in the city, independent collectives that accept our invitation to collaborate in the participatory process we propose; This is not only a way to get closer to different social groups but also promoting the participation of these groups in relation to one another, fostering interactions and emotional bonds, therefore creating contexts where people will engage and rethink forms of participation in the space that surrounds them.
This is a project made in collaboration with different agents in different stages. We aim at participation as the central focus of this project, not as an extractivist way but as an ethical way of exposing all the issues under study. We focus on public power and we need the populations and groups that we want to involve to understand the importance of their role in the construction of a better society but mainly, to make them understand that they have a voice that has value, no matter what the centers of power say.
Taking as a starting point the reasearch already made, we will organise several “open mic spots,with mediation and spotting the organizations, collectives and individuals. From there we will work in partnership with Social Studies Center of Coimbra University to cluster the issues addressed. With this in shape, with the help of artists and local communities, we will work to understand which are the most important and from this we will map the ones that can take part in the construction of the artistic pilot in Coimbra.
The application of our project in another geographical context intends (based on this desire to bring together different collectives that share in unison a special interest to add community participation into different artistic creations) a model capable of evolving in a plural and democratic way, to make the cultural landscape more accessible to underrepresented communities in the city.By inviting different collectives, we will inevitably obtain a unique dynamic by aggregating the identities of all of them, proposing a model of artistic production whose results will be very different when produced in another context in which this proposal is applied. This allows the replication of the project to gain different repercussions alluding to the social inclusion work included in our proposal, reinforcing a collective breath between collaborators, artists, the production team.
“[Re]thinking the City '' requires a holistic approach that explores sound studies and sound art, the relation between archive, power and art, sociology and politics. The city is a space of colliding sonic worlds, so it’s important to mobilize the field of sound studies to fortify the practices of active listening and of amplifying voices. We will work with a sound artist throughout the project to capture, modulate and perform our utopian sonic view. Also, to record and then perform, the field of archiving and its relation with art are central to this project. Archiving practices can constitute a form of concentrating power. We will try to use it as a form of dislocation and dispersion of power. Besides working as a deposit of voices, archiving will also be crucial to give guidelines for the replication and reappropriation of the project elsewhere. Another important element of our project is sociology. With the Center of Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, we will organize clusters from the statements collected that will allow us to deepen the claims of the population, reworking notions of dialogue between civil society and the local government bodies, as well as broadening concepts of citizenship. On the way, we believe that other concepts will arise, such as politics, ecology, and citizenship. That is why, in the development of this prototype, we will map different collectives from those different fields that will allow us to define a wider participation of inhabitants. The point of combining distinct areas and disciplines of knowledge is to equip us with the best methodologies for listening and amplifying - this will be crucial to get local answers, visions and solutions for global challenges, but also to allow us to create tools for collective expression, popular education and social intervention.
Various distinctive and innovative elements characterize this project, unfolding in multiple fronts: the translation of the complaints and solutions of a population into an artistic act done with the participation of those, from the beginning until the end; stimulating the relation between academic, popular culture and artistic research through collaboration with different city groups - inhabitants, artists, social and art collectives, independent organizations or academic institutions; presentation of a performative route that connects public spaces and communities; development of an archive system of these practices, promoting fruitful exchanges and the reappropriation of methodologies and practices developed in the project, facilitating a replicable process with the dissemination of these methodologies. We propose a creation of spaces that distinguish themselves by the collaboration of specialists and non-specialists through practices of interdisciplinarity and cooperation of different collaborators, to [Re]Think the city by promoting a redefinition of places of belonging and sensibility through devices of dialogue and the creation of more or less ephemeral structures that translate themselves in a sense of community, empowerment and emancipation. Furthermore we are a group of young people in the process of professionalization in the arts, and after being encouraged by Linha de Fuga, we finally feel prepared to develop a project that comes from an investigation that dates back from 2020, wanting to recreate forms of participation while establishing playful and artistic ways to do it, therefore promoting a innovative way of thinking about the voices in our city and ways to rethink power structures.
Our project intends to assume a replicable model, insofar as the work of articulation between the community and the cultural panorama reveals itself, at all times, necessary to think about the synergies of the social structure of a city. We believe that from this perspective it is possible to better understand which solutions can be raised, since art can be seen as a playground where it is possible to talk without fear. Part to all the development of the prototype at Coimbra, is the construction of a methodology or score that will define how this proposal can be transferred to other territories. Thus the importance of the University as a partner: what are the local characteristics of this project that can be transferred to global issues that then can be translated again to work on local issues. This is also the reason we defend that this project has to be made slowly at Coimbra, so that we can reshape and rethink the failures. The aim is to build a website that can be accessed by others for adaptation to other contexts. In all the stages of development, all the participants will think with us the best ways to communicate, to make available and to use the tools that we are proposing to use in Coimbra, not only as a format but also as a guide: how to map organizations, how to collect statements, how to define what to work, how to disseminate the statements, how to use the technology in favor, how to transform all the material into an artistic procedure, even if there are no artists involved. The most important thing is to make this archive and toolkit easy to use and to replicate the experience in whatever environment.
In 2020, we started an investigation based on a collective will to imperatively place ourselves in the community. We wanted to put Coimbra in debate: (re)think about it, talk about its stories, reflect on its problems, imagine its different futures.This collective desire to know our place in the community reflects a global problem. Although the answers projected by us are addressed to the city of Coimbra, we intend to establish methodological and practical forms that are possible to use by others to think about citizenship. The exercise of active listening to the invisible and inaudible dynamics of the city is a methodology that tries to respond to a more global problem of the sense of belonging. Aware that the communal spaces - being urban or rural - have their way of organizing, sometimes the population doesn’t take part in the center of decisions because they are tired and it demands a lot of energy, sometimes with no results. Art, however, has the power of highlighting social issues using dispositives that are easier to access. We want two things to happen: to make visible the local issues and to highlight art as an important way of connecting people with society. With this project, we want to create a web which is a score to be used and replicated in other contexts. We know that there are issues in communities that are global: living together, organization of public space, accessing services, etc. By creating this locally we can then translate this into global variables of societies so that they can be shaped to the local contexts, arising the local problems with an artistic output.
