New edition of the call ‘Alliances for a Cultural Democracy’

We are launching a new edition of our biennial call for Citizen Art ‘Alliances for a Cultural Democracy’, open until March 31. With it, we seek to support projects in which various cultural agents generate alliances to promote initiatives that promote greater cultural democracy, allowing the full participation of citizens in cultural life.

Promoting cultural mediation to awaken an empathetic and critical citizenry

At the Foundation we firmly believe in the value that cultural mediation can bring when it comes to creating fluid and meaningful relationships between institutions and people, and between people among themselves. Art can be a valuable tool for citizen and organizational empowerment, when cultural programs and policies promote its participatory dimension and understand its audiences as active agents of cultural life with the capacity to propose and decide. Artistic and cultural mediation has the power to activate that mechanism that allows art to articulate communities and, therefore, is a fundamental element of cultural democracy.

In reality, those activities to which we collectively give the name of “cultural or artistic mediation” are multiform, open and interdisciplinary, but all of them share the objective of raising awareness and mobilizing citizens through art, awakening their critical sense and their ability to empathize with other people, making cultural institutions proactive actors in this strategy and more open spaces that promote inclusivity and the genesis of alternative discourses.

Inspired by SDG 17 (Partnerships), our commitment to strengthening this activity and its professionals is reflected in our line of action “Mediation and Cultural Democracy“, which aims to blur the usual boundaries between cultural institutions and civil society, to contribute to greater cultural democracy and, consequently, a greater capacity of our society to face contemporary collective challenges. In the Foundation, in recent months, this commitment has taken the form of several initiatives that, although they focus on different aspects and profiles, share the same commitment: the Direct Complement, Concomitants or the MAR platform are some of them.

Now, we are opening our call ‘Alliances for a Cultural Democracy’ – which alternates for years with ‘Composing Knowledge‘, within our line of Citizen Art – with the desire to activate forms of relationship and joint work between different artistic and cultural agents, public and private, for greater inclusion and participation of people in artistic practices. that allow us to imagine and build desirable futures.

In search of alliances that make art a tool for emancipation

‘Alliances for a Cultural Democracy’ seeks projects carried out in alliance between different agents that, from the perspective of cultural rights (access, participation, creation) and through transformative cultural/artistic mediation practices, promote greater cultural democracy, allowing the full participation of citizens in cultural life and in the public sphere. with special emphasis on those groups or collectives with difficulties in accessing culture.

They must be initiatives that allow cultural institutions to question themselves and open up to new ways of doing and understanding their role in society and of relating to citizens; that enable the participatory design of cultural policies, programs and/or programs; and, in a broad sense, that contribute to guaranteeing the cultural rights of all people, with special emphasis on those groups or collectives with difficulties in accessing culture. The involvement of artists in the project will also be positively valued, as we consider that their point of view, ways of doing things and experience can be a very valuable contribution to initiatives of this type.

In the same way, the projects that we hope to be able to accompany with this new edition of ‘Alliances for a Cultural Democracy’ must be able to produce a lasting transformation in the context in which they are inscribed, demonstrate an innovative potential for their reality, promote citizen participation and cohesion in all its phases and propose a horizontal governance model. at the same time that they face a specific social challenge for the community or the context in which they are inscribed.

We hope that these alliances will result in innovative and committed practices so that citizen participation in cultural institutions and cultural life becomes a consolidated reality. We started Alliances for a Cultural Democracy 2022 with the hope of being able to address the challenges of our present and our future from a paradigm based on empathy, collective action and common interest.

Alliances for a Cultural Democracy, 2022

• Until March 31, 2022
• Aimed at alliance projects between: cultural institutions, public administrations, organisations and professionals specialised in the field of cultural/artistic mediation and/or third sector organisations.
• Accompaniment from 12 months to 3 years.
• €400,000 to support the development of between 5 and 10 initiatives.
• A virtual briefing is planned for early March. More information on our Twitter, LinkedIn and newsletter.