Cultural and artistic initiatives to environmental challenges: Call for proposals

The Prince Claus Fund and the Goethe-Institut are issuing a new Call for Proposals to support cultural and artistic initiatives tackling pressing environmental issues around the world. The Call for Proposals: Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change builds on its 2018 edition

Alarming changes in nature and the 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 causes and consequences are being hotly debated by politicians, scientists and the broader public, the most affected people are often those who are least able to stop the process.

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.

This call for proposals is aimed at Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. It seeks to support initiatives 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 organisers are specifically looking to support initiatives that:

• Employ new media to re-imagine a more sustainable world, and provide space for different perspectives within the sustainability discussion
• Promote the inclusion of women and minority groups
• Support concrete cultural initiatives that enable local impact while encouraging a global exchange on culture of sustainability and climate justice
• Encourage out of the box initiatives by artists and cultural practitioners looking to re-imagine conventional approaches to environmental sustainability and climate justice
• Support the development of artistic and creative initiatives that reinforce and rethink traditional knowledge and methods as a means to promote sustainability and climate justice
• Stimulate and inspire communities to use sustainable materials and resources within their own contexts and practice

With this call for proposals the organisers would like to invite artists and cultural practitioners to envision a future for the planet that is more environmentally friendly, and to propose their cultural/artistic responses to how we can jointly get there. The organisers would like to challenge all interested in this call to create innovative concepts that link artistic cultural engagement to environmental sustainability and climate justice.

The Prince Claus Fund and the Goethe-Institut will support initiatives within the financial range of €15,000 – €20,000.

The deadline to apply is 14 June (5 pm CET). More details and info on how to apply here.