The second edition of the Postgraduate Programme in Cultural Management and Sustainability has concluded
The second edition of the Postgraduate Programme in Cultural Management and Sustainability, promoted by FLUC in collaboration with the FCT exploratory research project GREENARTS, based at CEIS20, concluded on 17 June. The course, coordinated by Professors Fernando Matos Oliveira and Vânia Rodrigues, constituted a pioneering training offer linking the fields of arts management, cultural policy, and ecology.
Over the course of its two editions, the programme brought together around 50 arts and culture professionals from cultural institutions across Portugal, with the support of the Portuguese Directorate-General for the Arts.
The ethical, political, and practical challenges facing the arts in the context of the ecological emergency will continue to receive attention at the University of Coimbra, with new study programmes and a variety of research projects already in development.
At the end of the Postgraduate Programme, and following a Thought Residency held in Fundão with the support of the Municipal Council, the students collectively produced an Ecozine, accompanied by a repository of images and a video, both of which are now available.
Ecozine synopsis:
Open Call for a Collective Manifesto
10 months, 28 days, 196 hours, 5,595 km later, we became a collective of diverse and motivated people. The arts and culture are spaces of infinite possibilities but finite resources.
10 months, 28 days, 196 hours, 5,595 km later, we remain in the same places, in the same discord, in the same discomfort. It is hard to continue, hard to break through, hard to do things differently.
Yet, we still wanted to try another way. To take a risk. To break with the rules and with predetermined modes of production. To embrace the challenge of the collective, the cooperative, the communal, the compromises.
In this first edition of the Ecozine, developed in the Laboratory of the fourth curricular unit of the Postgraduate Programme in Cultural Management and Sustainability, we sought to break individualism and challenge the usual logic of individual work. Everywhere, miracle solutions are found to accelerate human metabolism and optimise productivity. Nowhere near as many miracle recipes exist to slow down society’s metabolism. We experimented with the collective, sharing, imbalance — tense, imperfect — so that the possibility of another path might emerge. With many hands and few rules, we shared reflections, frustrations, hopes, more or less poetic thoughts, images, feelings, and geographies that resulted from this time together.
In this process of collaging and editing, we chose to listen closely, to engage with a future that includes all beings. Without definitive answers, but with the urgency to keep testing, we move forward.
This Open Call for a Collective Manifesto is still a work in progress, without end, without certainties. It is our proposal to try to do things differently, to take risks, to break the rules and find new ways of doing. We want to move, yes, but with responsibility and purpose. How far are we willing to go for ecological and regenerative actions? How far will the collective allow?
