Two calls address the ecosocial challenges of our environment: “Composing Knowledge” and “From the Field to the Pantry”

We will finance with a total of €900,000 between 11 and 19 inspiring projects. With these calls for our two lines of work – Citizen Art and Sustainable Food – we call on the artistic, scientific, humanistic community and all participants to participate in the different phases of the agroecological food process.

Aware of a different and changing reality, the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation launched our two 2021 calls. These are “Composing Knowledge to Imagine and Build Sustainable Futures”, in the line of Citizen Art and “From the Countryside to the Pantry. Collective entrepreneurship to accelerate the leap in scale of agroecological food” in the line of Sustainable Food. With them, we decisively address the emergency of climate change and social justice, fundamental challenges in the context of reconstruction in which we live.

With these calls we want to put in the hands of society tools to reimagine and activate new paths of transformation towards a sustainable life that respects people and ecosystems. Due to the complexity of the challenges to be addressed, in both calls we are open to a diversity of agents and types of projects and disciplines, with the aim of building bridges that help society to rethink our future.

From the first steps of the Foundation, with these calls we want to identify projects at any stage of development that connect with the challenges of today’s society. We want to identify them because we want to support them in their implementation, in a change of scale or in their replicability to other realities.

On this occasion we face an essential challenge, as we have only nine years left to achieve a transformation that achieves the objectives of the 2030 Agenda. In these calls we share the experience already acquired in previous editions and in previous attempts by society towards the transition to a more sustainable model. We also start knowing that deep and empathetic cooperation between various sectors is necessary. For this reason, we know that artistic processes contribute to imagining and putting into practice new methodologies of collaboration and connection, opening up new universes of research. Also, that food is transversal to all areas of life and that Sustainable Food takes care of people, living beings, the Earth, societies and the future.

The budget we allocate to these calls is a total of 900,000 Euros with which we will be able to support between 11 and 19 projects. The application period is now open and all those projects whose characteristics conform to the bases will have until April 20 to submit their candidacies.

Sustainable Food: “From the Field to the Pantry: Collective Entrepreneurship to Accelerate the Leap in Scale of Agroecological Food”

With our work in the Sustainable Food line, we aim to guarantee universal access to food that respects people and ecosystems. Food sustainability must therefore encompass four dimensions: environmental, economic, social justice and the health of people and the planet.

If we take these pillars as a reference, it becomes clear that, far from being a common good like the others, food is at the crossroads of multiple (im)balances derived from the decisions made from production to consumption: loss of biodiversity, increase in social inequalities and, of course, direct consequences for health and climate change.

These challenges converge in the 2021 call From the Field to the Pantry, which we direct to collective initiatives for the transformation, preparation and/or distribution of agroecological and local food. We want to reach projects whose core work is any type of food products from sustainable production systems, whether derived from livestock, agriculture, fishing, beekeeping or other collective or extractive activities, as well as other forms of obtaining primary products.

The objective of the support we provide is to improve economic sustainability and facilitate the leap in scale of small-scale, agroecological and local production. We also seek to promote the role of food in addressing the fight against the climate emergency and social justice, through more sustainable practices that promote the optimization of processes in environmental terms, the socio-economic revitalization of the territory, innovation to increase the supply of healthy products, and access to Sustainable Food for all people. To this end, different types of initiatives may apply for the call:

• Shared workshops: all those spaces where several people or companies can prepare their agroecological preparations to take them to the market with a sanitary registration.

• Existing public or private kitchens for use as community kitchens, intended for the preparation of sustainable and agroecological menus for a given community and, particularly, for people in vulnerable situations.

• Collective logistics and distribution initiatives, which currently represent a bottleneck for Sustainable Food. The call is aimed at collection centers, shared transport platforms, logistics spaces, cooperative supermarkets, sales platforms and any other type of initiatives for the distribution of agroecological and local products based on the principles of the social and solidarity economy, social innovation and the participation of producers in governance.

In all cases, projects applying for funding under this call must have defined their governance model. In addition, the projects must work with products of their own production, sourcing from the food obtained by the producers participating in said governance.

Check the complete rules of “From the field to the pantry” in the calls section.

Citizen Art: “Composing Knowledge to Imagine and Build Sustainable Futures. We promote projects based on collaboration between artists, researchers and citizens that address the eco-social challenges of the present.”

At the Foundation we are aware that culture and the arts, in all their dimensions, have proven to be essential to address the different challenges that affect contemporary society. The problems of the current social ecosystem require active citizenship and an artistic community that addresses their challenges, jointly using the knowledge of science, the arts, society and letters. Under this conviction, since 2015 and on a biennial basis, we launched “Compponer Saberes”. In this fourth call, we are now addressing a greater concern about the complexity of the climate and social justice emergency.

It is in this context that we address the research capacity of the artistic community to weave networks of cooperation with agents from other disciplines and with agents of society in general with the aim of facing contemporary socio-ecological challenges. In “Composing knowledge” we also seek to place the climate crisis as one of the essential challenges to be addressed, along with the challenges in terms of social justice derived from this context.

The call is open to projects in which at least the following participate:

• An artist, collective or entity in the field of visual, musical or sound arts, performing arts, performance, film or video, architecture, design or any field related to creation.
• A researcher, collective or entity in the field of fundamental and experimental sciences, human and social sciences.

The application can be submitted by any of the agents involved in the project, provided that it is a non-profit organisation or legal entities belonging to the social and solidarity economy.

Check the complete rules of “Composing knowledge” in the calls section.

Image credits: projects benefiting from the calls ‘Comparponer saberes’ (2015-2019) and ‘Obradores compartidas’ (2019).