We invite you to know the minutes of the Assembly of Composers of Knowledge

The set of projects that we have supported within the framework of the “Composing knowledge to understand contemporary challenges” programme, from the creation of this call in 2015 to mid-May 2019, have been 45, 33 in France and 12 in Spain.

All these projects respond to the need to respond to the pressing challenges posed by contemporary reality in a current context of multiple political, economic, social and environmental crises. A situation that is also a “crisis of thought”, of hegemonic knowledge, of institutions that produce culture and knowledge, as well as of our systems of creation and research subject to ultra-specialized mechanisms of justification, qualification and evaluation that distance us, on the one hand, from the reality of the problems on the ground and, on the other hand, on the other, to one another.

At the same time, increasingly, problems are defined by research management structures and journals ranked according to the level of excellence. On the other hand, fewer and fewer civil society actors are taking on this role, which entails a strong demobilisation of these actors. There is a lot of talk about participatory sciences but they are still in the minority.

Responding to challenges to promote transformative actions

These multiple intrinsically related crises, and the current context exposed, provoke a deep feeling of helplessness, which pushes us from the Foundation to look outside our comfort zone, to exchange glances and experiences, to look for the tools of others, to explore the interstices of the different forms of knowledge production, to open their black boxes and those of the entities that produce them. to invent ways of co-producing, of vindicating forms of production, of valuing knowledge (scientific and non-scientific) and of relations between different systems of knowledge that comprise a great diversity of experiences and plural forms of knowledge, traditionally made invisible or inferiorized by generalized modernity (indigenous cosmologies, the solidarity economy or peasant knowledge, to name just a few).

It forces us, therefore, to compose knowledge for the necessary expansion of the collective imagination, as the philosopher Marina Garcés says: “We must connect knowledge with its true questions, those that really matter to us, and not with predetermined objectives”*. For this reason, we are convinced that the current moment demands that the scientific and artistic community collaborate and open up to the public, allowing new articulations between two great narratives about the world: the scientific and the artistic. Therefore, promoting initiatives and projects of collective creation and research is a privileged strategy to connect with our world from other places.

*Garcés (M.), Opus. cit., p. 43

A call that connects knowledge, institutions and agents

For all these reasons, the call “Composing knowledge to understand contemporary challenges“, whose new edition opened on March 5, 2019 and ended on May 16, seeks to promote contexts of encounter, collaboration and hybridization between the sciences and humanities, the arts and society. In this way, the interconnections between the different problems are better understood in order to generate the political and cultural changes necessary for the humanities and the arts to regain their weight in society (particularly in schools and universities), returning them to the community as levers for questioning the world and social change. Thanks to this, the empathetic, citizen and critical perspective can prevail over the purely technical and mercantile.

The connection of the arts with other fields of knowledge and agents therefore seems to be an appropriate way to give a new meaning, agenda and power to art, as well as to connect knowledge, institutions and/or agents that produce it with the arts, reformulating questions, expanding research tools, incorporating sensitivity, imagination and direct experience into research.

Projects for social change

The 45 projects that we have supported from France and Spain in all these years were part of a seminar within the framework of the event “We are not the number we think we are”, held on February 2, 2018 at the Cité internationale des Arts. Each of them involves at least one artistic discipline that coexists with others such as ecology, health, anthropology, ethnography, music, neuroscience, etc. Sometimes art is perceived as a generator of knowledge and experiences, or as a tool for awareness and dissemination.

They respond above all to a need to transform our cultural and scientific institutions, although each project also deals with issues that go beyond the institutions themselves because they concern social issues (health, ecology, education, migration, social conditions, etc.), in turn linked to other institutional fabrics. For certain projects, the main objective is to transform the environment of education, for others that of research, health, social assistance devices, etc.

And here are available the Minutes of the Extraordinary General Assembly of Composers of Knowledge, held on February 2, 2018 at the Cité internationale des Arts within the framework of the event: “We are not the number we think we are” that we organize. These proceedings collect opinions and ideas of its participants and are written by Julia Morandeira and Valérie Pihet.

Discover some projects of the call “Composing knowledge to understand contemporary challenges” in videos.

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