4Cs: from conflict to conviviality through creativity and culture
4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture was a European Cooperation Project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The 4Cs aimed to understand how training and education in art and culture can constitute powerful resources to address the issue of conflict as well as to envision creative ways in which to deal with conflictual phenomena, while contributing to audience development through active participation and co-production.
Cross-border/international
Denmark
Germany
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: France
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Portugal
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Lithuania
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Spain
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Sweden
{Empty}
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
Creative Europe
Culture Programme of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Large scale cooperation project (2017-21).
No
Yes
2021-12-31
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Universidade Católica Portuguesa Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Luisa Last name of representative: Santos Gender: Female Nationality: Portugal Function: Researcher and Assistant Professor Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Palma de Cima Town: Lisbon Postal code: 1649-023 Country: Portugal Direct Tel:+351 918 326 041 E-mail:luisa.santos@ucp.pt Website:https://fch.lisboa.ucp.pt
4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture was a European Cooperation Project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The 4Cs aimed to understand how training and education in art and culture can constitute powerful resources to address the issue of conflict as well as to envision creative ways in which to deal with conflictual phenomena, while contributing to audience development through active participation and co-production. The project aimed at advancing the conceptual framework of intercultural dialogue and enhancing the role of public arts and cultural institutions in fostering togetherness through cultural diversity and intercultural encounters.
The European Commission has acknowledged that tackling the migration and refugee crisis is a European obligation that requires a comprehensive strategy and a determined effort. Within such framework, the European Commission has emphasised the role of culture and the arts in contributing towards building a more cohesive and open society through the integration of refugees, helping them to better understand their new environment and its interaction with their own socio-cultural background.
Grounded in the belief that culture and creative practice can emerge as powerful resources in conflict situations, the 4Cs responded to this challenge by exploring the ways in which culture and the arts can help bring individuals together within a model of intercultural dialogue, mutual recognition, and equal participation. This was achieved by fostering equal involvement and by promoting cross-cultural collaboration through the creation and development of different activities such as exhibitions, artistic and research residencies, film screenings, mediation labs, workshops, conferences, publications, an online platform, and a Summer School.
society
people
migration
conflict
arts
Sustainability in the 4Cs was addressed in terms of social and cultural sustainability. Objectives included:
• Elevating the potential of the social role of European art and cultural institutions in a sustainable, lasting way, in mediating conflict and post-conflict situations, at training, educating, and programming levels
• Motivating a sustainable transnational cooperation, with a special focus on the people who need more (social minorities) for the consolidation of a European project that is facing a moment of profound crisis;
• Contributing to a lasting change of attitude and informed exercise of citizenship.
Our main objectives were reflected in activities reaching from theory and applied research to artistic and cultural education, mediation, programming and management. With these, the 4Cs raised awareness about the role of creative and cultural work in the strengthening of European identity and European citizenship in a project of peace and conviviality. 4Cs supported community members in their role as active agents in the cultural scene at local, regional, national and international levels and contributed to a lasting change of attitude and active citizenship in the local communities in which it acted upon.
Conflict and post-conflict situations differ from context to context and the participants needed to engage with each context in order to produce effective and meaningful work. By interacting between theoretical and practical knowledge through training and education and sharing good practices between different partners with different experiences in their historical pasts of conflicts and reconciliation, 4Cs developed transnational cooperation for the consolidation of a European Union that is facing a moment of profound crisis.
With its multiple activities, including conferences, residencies, workshops, mediation labs, a summer school, a multi-chapter exhibition
• Stimulating interest in, and improving access to, European cultural and creative works that reflect on the current European scenario, which is faced with trials and challenges posed by diverse war theatres;
• Organising transnational cultural activities - conferences, residencies, workshops, mediation labs, a summer school, a multi-chapter exhibition, an itinerary film programme, and an online platform – that support the circulation of European cultural and artistic production in a moment of conflict.
4Cs activities make up a collective work that promotes the integration of different groups/sectors and highlights the role of the community. Migrants and refugees actively participated in several activities, such as Tensta Konsthall’s Mediation Lab “The Silent University Cafe”, organizing sessions for the learning of Arabic and Swedish; there, beyond the study of language, the sharing of experiences and ideas is promoted, always with Tensta’s exhibitions working as a departing point for the conversations. ENSAD, Paris, developed a workshop lasting three months hosting various sessions of knowledge sharing between migrants and students; debates were held between the students and local associations and a tour of the neighbourhood of St. Denis also took place, an area in the north of Paris known for its strong multiculturality. Underprivileged groups were also included in the project’s activities, namely at the Multi-Chapter Exhibition in Lisbon where we partnered with Grupo de Teatro do Oprimido, a collective that invests in interventions in critical neighbourhoods in the city’s outskirts seeking to involve the residents in an active way, especially the younger sectors. Barcelona also held a workshop right at the start of the project, where the community of Barceloneta (fishermen neighbourhood) together with local associations, promoted guided tours to that territory, still somewhat unexplored and unknown by the city’s own residents.
• Encouraging international cooperation, career development and interaction between theoretical and practical knowledge through training and education with a series of activities including staff-swap between partner institutions;
• Facilitating access to career opportunities to artists and researchers in different career levels;
• Developing the awareness and participation of audiences that usually do not attend art exhibitions and cultural events;
• Testing innovative approaches to audience development through a series of mediation labs and workshops (following a principle of proximity) that will inform the development of a “handbook of good practices in mediation of conflict situations through artistic practice, creativity and culture”;
Our mediation labs and workshops aimed to show the importance of design and artistic methodologies in the process of understanding and integrating social, political and cultural issues of past and present migrations. The activities revolved around the co-creation of ‘tools of conviviality’ that could play an active role in improving togetherness in society, with theoretical contributions, field work, exhibitions, residencies, and international conferences. Students at the partner institutions explored co-creation methodologies that highlighted know-hows, inventions and imaginaries in relation to contexts of migration. However, as we collaborated with ‘migrants’, we soon traded our hesitant vocabulary for the own lexicon of our new friends, who preferred the name ‘newcomers’. Embracing a language was a first step in equipping ourselves with new stories, new points of view on migration. And many stories were shared, as we learned and created together: students, tutors, newcom- ers. Stories of people and places. Stories of experience and theory. Stories of making sense, and making kin.
Migrants and refugees actively participated in several activities, such as Tensta Konsthall’s Mediation Lab “The Silent University Cafe”, organizing sessions for the learning of Arabic and Swedish; there, beyond the study of language, the sharing of experiences and ideas is promoted, always with Tensta’s exhibitions working as a departing point for the conversations. ENSAD, Paris, developed a workshop lasting three months hosting various sessions of knowledge sharing between migrants and students; debates were held between the students and local associations and a tour of the neighbourhood of St. Denis also took place, an area in the north of Paris known for its strong multiculturality. Underprivileged groups were also included in the project’s activities, namely at the Multi-Chapter Exhibition in Lisbon where we partnered with Grupo de Teatro do Oprimido, a collective that invests in interventions in critical neighbourhoods in the city’s outskirts seeking to involve the residents in an active way, especially the younger sectors. Barcelona also held a workshop right at the start of the project, where the community of Barceloneta (fishermen neighbourhood) together with local associations, promoted guided tours to that territory, still somewhat unexplored and unknown by the city’s own residents
4Cs brought together theory, applied research, artistic and cultural education, mediation, programming and management. With this collaborative transnational project, which joined academic partners with profiles in teaching and applied research in the cultural and artistic fields (FCH-UCP; Royal College of Art; Vilnius Academy of Arts; and ENSAD) with professional partners working in the artistic and cultural areas with profiles in applied research, artistic and cultural education, mediation and programming as well as arts management (Tensta Konsthall; SAVVY Contemporary; Fundació Antoni Tàpies; and Museet for Samtidskunst), the project involved all partners, their staff, students, and local partners / institutions and grassroots organisations to stimulate capacity building by enabling young researchers, students and artists in different career stages to enrich their careers, professional skills and embrace new opportunities on the European labour market. All partners of the 4Cs engaged in local partnerships to contribute to audience development in communities that do not usually attend cultural events, elevating the potential of the social role of art and cultural institutions. Before the joint application, all partners have met, collectively, to define division of roles, tasks, and to create a common process to create a code of conduct to support conviviality across all projects' activities in the 8 countries. We conducted staff swaps in the 4 years of the project, which contributed to knowledge exchange in many aspects of the project, including in finding ways to connect with our stakeholders and shareholders.
4Cs activities have an interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral nature in the sense that they all bring together different disciplinary approaches to the analysis and/or creative work within a given topic. The Multi-Chapter Exhibitions are just one example of how this happens at multiple levels: as they take place at cultural-artistic institutions and are curated by cultural-creative professionals they are strongly connected to the tangible culture of museology, while using specific disciplines as their media (architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film, video, graphic and digital arts, etc.), and simultaneously representing and/or reflecting on other tangible cultural fields (historical sites, libraries, archives, creative writing, museums) as well as intangible cultural fields such as those of memory, representation, identity, performative actions). The same process takes place in all other 4Cs activities where given specific/main disciplinary or sectorial approaches/backgrounds are used as the foundational structures for the processes of analysis/creation/representation – and consequent discussions and debates – of other disciplinary or sectorial topics. 2 other examples: a craftworks/design workshop intended to tackle the intangible culture of food (and customs/knowledge) sharing; an artistic residency using performance, photography, and video to tackle the intangibility of the intergenerational cultural memory of historic(al) events.
Academics and professionals in arts and culture participating in the different 4Cs activities have the opportunity to meet colleagues from other cultural traditions and relevant figures in European artistic creation, encouraging the establishment of closer relations and the launch of new projects. The participation of postgraduate students is very relevant to the project in terms of knowledge production and exchange as well as management. Students are highly motivated to participate in different activities, such as in liaising with the artists and assisting in production tasks. They contribute to the online platform with essays showcasing theoretical reflections and visual accounts on artistic practices. Cultural managers, both public and private, work on tools to foster benchmarking and the dissemination of best practices. Educators in schools, mediators in cultural centres, and mass media help to bring art closer to citizens as in the workshop run by ENSAD. During the workshop, students, experts, local migrant associations, artists, and designers co-developed, with migrants, new tools of conviviality that will allow all of them to improve their standard of living, together, by highlighting the migrants’ specific know-hows. The general public, specific groups, and social communities have free access to 4Cs activities, as the project seeks direct participation guaranteeing the integration of its network within society and promoting a relationship between different publics and contemporary visual artists. The cultural exchange of the Residencies creates bridges of understanding and deconstructs prejudices, and also adds to the training and education through creation of good practices at various levels and origins of conflicting situations. With Aimée Zito Lema in Lisbon, the teenagers performed as artists at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, where they were properly acknowledged, which is ground-breaking in the Portuguese and in the institutional colonial history.
Innovation, under the conceptual framework of the project, was achieved in the ways it contributed to the transfer and dissemination of new socially inclusive and convivial practices of transnational curating, mediation, teaching, and presentation of art and culture across European regions as well as sectors (visual arts, culture, media from both professional and academic practices).
Innovation was achieved on:
- Creation of new methods and art mediation practices of working the conflict in our institutions;
- Connecting issues of pressing social relevance to broad-scope artistic/cultural production on the wider institutional structures of domination.
- Shifting the fragmented focus on conflict and war into the intersectional study of the flows of living together while nurturing our social, cultural, racial, gender, age references;
- Another innovative aspect of the 4Cs lies in bringing together practice-based and theoretical aesthetic epistemologies and knowledge (via the interdisciplinary exhibition spaces and the universities that compose the consortium) to address emerging types of conflict at the heart of Europe, and to develop creative practices to promote conviviality as a new model of intercultural dialogue.
To respond to our objectives and priorities, a series of activities, with both a theoretical and a practical scope and approach, were carried out. 4Cs activities promoted intercultural dialogue and brought communities together through culture in shared public spaces. Such intercultural dialogue promoted by the activities brought people together and helped towards conflict prevention and the process of reconciliation. The activities and outputs of 4Cs offered the participating researchers, students, artists and curators the opportunity to acquire new academic and professional skills in a context marked by cultural and linguistic diversity.
The combination of theory and practice in training and education allowed for the development and transference of research and cultural management skills in a fruitful dialogue between researchers and practitioners while developing audiences and a series of good practices that were implemented through practical activities both during and after the project’s duration.
The activities ranged from Residencies; Workshops; Mediation Labs; Conferences; a Summer School; a Multi-Chapter Exhibition; an Itinerary Film Programme; and an Online Platform. The inclusion of refugees and migrants will not only be addressed but also encouraged through participation in activities such as the Residencies; the Workshops and the Mediation Labs. The goal was to devise activities informed by the latest theoretical developments in conflict and intercultural dialogue, but also to allow these activities to shape the reflection on the topics at hand, contributing both to audience development and to capacity building / training and education. Thus, the activities contributed to stimulate the interest in European cultural production in a moment of conflict while developing and exchanging research and professional skills in the cultural and creative fields.
Throughout its existence and since its founding, in the peak of the 2016-17 refugee crisis, the 4Cs sought to understand how training and education in art and culture could constitute powerful resources to address the issue of conflict as well as to envision creative ways in which to deal with conflictual phenomena. The 4Cs aimed at advancing the conceptual framework of intercultural dialogue and enhancing the role of public arts and cultural institutions in fostering togetherness through cultural diversity and intercultural encounters. While in each of the 8 contexts / countries of the 4Cs, each institutional partner experienced conflict and conviviality in different ways, there were 3 challenges / conflicts shared (albeit in different / local ways) by all partners when trying to foster togetherness through cultural diversity and intercultural encounters as well as in practical aspects of our activities: systemic racism; gender inequity; and the environmental crisis. When facing these shared challenges, we could see that they were connected and that they had colonial roots. Furthermore, while we could witness many of the artists participating in the 4Cs were developing their practices against colonial modernity and addressing the links between race, gender, and the environment, we could also see that, without major turns at the level of direction and organisation in the institutions, their best interventions continue to be framed monoculturally in concepts such as Eco aesthetics, feminisms, and postcolonialisms. This lesson can be replicated in future projects and institutions - change should be done from within each institution, taking in account each context. Another lesson that can be replicated is our co-creative methodology - engaging with our stakeholders and shareholders in various moments of the project's design allows both for a sense of belonging and accountability.
In 2017, the notion of conflict was currently undergoing decisive transformations and Europe more than ever provides a centre-stage to these changes. After decades of institutional efforts to foster European identity, Europe is becoming a space of uncertainty and unrest. Founded in the aftermath of a destructive war, Europe created the institutional, political, and legal frameworks to sustain a project of peace, solidarity, and mutual relief. While current challenges undoubtedly require the formulation of new questions and solutions, the 4Cs project also looks at Europe as a project far from being exhausted, quite the contrary. Europe’s desideratum of peaceful coexistence is still to be fulfilled, but in need of re-articulation. It is also important to understand that art, as a creative form, is inherently conflictual as it involves rupture and the collision of differences as methodologies to perceive, reflect upon, and visually translate (alternative proposals to) the world we live in.
4Cs activities make up a collective work that promotes the integration of different groups/sectors and highlights the role of the community. Migrants and refugees actively participated in several activities, such as Tensta Konsthall’s Mediation Lab “The Silent University Cafe”, organizing sessions for the learning of Arabic and Swedish; there, beyond the study of language, the sharing of experiences and ideas is promoted, always with Tensta’s exhibitions working as a departing point for the conversations. ENSAD, Paris, developed a workshop hosting various sessions of knowledge sharing between migrants and students. Underprivileged groups were also included in the project’s activities, namely at the Multi-Chapter Exhibition in Lisbon where we partnered with Grupo de Teatro do Oprimido, a collective that invests in interventions in critical neighbourhoods in the city’s outskirts seeking to involve the residents in an active way, especially the younger sectors.
