News

PARTIS – Artistic Practices for Social Inclusion

Support program for projects that favor art as a means of social intervention with groups in situations of vulnerability or exclusion.

PARTIS (Artistic Practices for Social Inclusion) is a programme that allows the Gulbenkian Foundation to realize its conviction that art is an agent for inclusion and social change through its unique power to bring people together.

It has been designed to support projects that use artistic practices (music, photography, video, theatre, dance, circus, among others) as tools to create bridges between communities that normally do not cross paths, representing an investment of around €2 million over a period of five years. The project “Integrating through Art – This space I live in”, is one of the multiple projects that results form this wonderfull program and deal with the visit to several educational centers in the country, to put young people in hospital in contact with photography.

The initiative covers a total target audience of more than 200 people and aims to “contradict what is immediate, fast photography and [young people] end up doing the opposite process,” explained producer Tânia Araújo.

“It is a fully participatory process, since each of these young people will have to build their own camera – a stenopeic camera. After the machine is built, the young people will analyze the maps of the city where they are and choose the places they would like to visit ”, explained the people responsible for the project, which has already taken place in two educational centers in Lisbon and is now in Porto, then on to Coimbra and Guarda.

Tânia Araújo said that the project continues a work done by the Photographic Expression Movement since 2007 and sought to respond to the lack of activities, in particular for young people who are in a closed regime, that is, who cannot leave the center, except in certain exceptions.

“There are not many activities in the educational centers for them to be able to do”, said the project’s producer, stressing that, sometimes, some of those involved even say that the trainers are “making fun of them” and question: “How is it it possible, through a cardboard they assemble, to be able to take a photograph?” Tânia Araújo summarizes in one sentence what is the work of the project “This space that I inhabit”: “We are giving them freedom for a moment”