Support for 'Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change' Prince Claus Fund and Goethe-Institut

Alarming changes in nature and our environment are all around us: forests and wildlife are disappearing; air and oceans are increasingly polluted; sea levels are rising, and the frequency of extreme weather phenomena is increasing. While courses of action are debated in governments and in the media, the people who are most affected are often the least heard.

Cultural practitioners, artists, architects and designers in many parts of the world are initiating projects, exchanging ideas and rethinking responses to environmental change, while actively engaging their communities. Now, more than ever, we need the arts and culture to help us respond; to inspire and motivate us by offering new ideas that challenge our perceptions and change our habits by introducing radical and transdisciplinary perspectives and envisioning models of climate justice in the world.

Since 2018, the joint programme of the Goethe-Institut and the Prince Claus Fund supports initiatives from Africa, Latin and South America, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe that enable local communities as well as global institutions to engage with the threatening changes of nature and our environment through contemporary artistic and cultural interventions. We encourage ground-breaking cultural initiatives by individual artists, creative professionals as well as cultural organisations; especially initiatives that express how the arts and new media can propose solutions to environmental issues and create alternatives that support sustainability and foster cooperation and an exchange of new ideas globally.

The following 20 projects were selected at the end of 2019 and will be implemented from 2020 onwards:

• APPLE: Ancient Future Knowledge (Janna Mambetova, Cultural Dialogue/ Kazakhstan)
• Biblioteca Comunitária Flutuante Mamori (Marko Brajovic/ Brazil)
• Buiúnas and Altamira: An Encounter between Art, Women and Rivers (Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha, Aruac Films/ Brazil)
• CLIMAVORE: How We Eat as Humans Change Climates (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, SALT/ Turkey)
• Devouring Architecture (Ishak Jalimam, REALSTAGE/ Bosnian and Herzegovina)
• Documentary for Social Change (Kibrom Berhane, Furtuna Kahsay and Tesfagebriel Tekola/ Ethiopia)
• Educational Games as a Radical Tool (Ali Azmy, Makouk/ Egypt)
• EnvaTechs - Sustainable Environmental Education Project (Esra’a Al Sanie, EnvaTechs/ Jordan)
• If We Vanish (Nikhil Nagaraj/ India)
• IMPOSTERGABLE / UNPOSTPONABLE (Ana Milena Garzón Sabogal, Fundación Más Arte Más Acción/ Colombia)
• In the Light of Change (Elwely Vall/ Mauritania)
• INFRARED on Pressing Environmental Issues (Nita Zeqiri, Shtatëmbëdhjetë (17)/ Kosovo)
• Objetos em Redes (Giselda Fernanandes, Os Dois Produções Artísticas/ Brazil)
• Re-Aligning the Cosmos (Zoe Butt, The Factory Contemporary Arts Center/ Vietnam)
• Response-Ability (Linzi Lewis, Ruth Sacks and Tara Weber/ South Africa)
• Samtal Jameen – Samtal Jameer / Equal Terrains – Equal Beings (Ravi Agarwal, Toxics Link/ India)
• Señales en Común (Catalina Juárez, Nature Expression and Resonance Research Laboratory/ Mexico)
• The Chorography of the Euphrates (Tamara Abdul Hadi and Roi Saade/ Lebanon)
• Vietnam Grey-Green Dictionary (Nguyen Trinh Thi, Hanoi Doclab, Manzi Art Space/ Vietnam)
• Where We All Meet (Kristina Pulejkova/ North Macedonia)

Photo Credits: Elwely Vall