Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change - 2019 call for proposals

Building on the success of the previous year, 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, through which 15 exceptional projects were supported.

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 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.

We 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 we would like to invite artists and cultural practitioners to envision a future for our planet that is more environmentally friendly , and to propose their cultural/artistic responses to how we can jointly get there. We 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 for the submission of project applications is 14 June 2019 at 17:00h Amsterdam Time.

Eligible Candidates

• Support is only given to individual persons or organisations living, registered and working in DAC-listed countries. Individuals applying for the call must be citizens of one of the countries.

• In the case of a collaborative project with individuals or organizations from outside the eligible countries, the above criteria apply to the main applicant.

Eligible Expenses

• This call only covers project-related expenses, and not running (operating) costs for organisations.

Place and Duration

• No support will be provided retroactively, i.e. to projects in implementation or projects already implemented.

• Projects must start implementation from March 2020, and be implemented by April 2021 at the latest.

Check guidelines for full eligibility information and how to apply