The Prince Claus Fund and the Goethe-Institut announce a new joint Call for Proposals: Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change. Seeks to support initiatives from Asia, Eastern Europe, as well as Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean (DAC-listed countries only).

Our environment undergoes rapid and dramatic changes. Our forests and wildlife are disappearing. Our air and oceans are increasingly polluted and sea levels are rising, along with the incidence of extreme weather phenomena. While causes and consequences are being hotly debated by politicians and scientists for decades, 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 and exchanging ideas and rethinking responses to environmental change, while actively engaging their communities. But now even 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 through introducing transdisciplinary and multispecies perspectives.

This call for proposals seeks to support initiatives from Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe that enable local communities as well as global institutions to engage with cultural changes caused by anticipated as well as present 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 can propose solutions to environmental issues and create alternatives that support sustainability and the preservation of the environment as well as foster global exchange of new ideas.

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.

We are specifically looking to support initiatives that:

-       Employ creativity to re-imagine a more sustainable world, and provide space for different perspectives within the sustainability discussion

-       Promote the vital role that arts and culture play in mobilizing communities to raise awareness

-       Support concrete cultural initiatives that enable local impact while encouraging a global culture of sustainability 

-       Encourage out of the box initiatives by artists and cultural practitioners looking to re-imagine conventional approaches to environmental sustainability

-       Support the development of artistic and creative initiatives that reinforce and rethink traditional knowledge and methods as a means to promote sustainability

-       Stimulate and inspire communities to use sustainable materials and resources within their own contexts and practices

With this call for proposals we would like to invite artists and cultural practitioners to envision the future that is more environmentally friendly for our planet, 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.

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 Tuesday, September 25, 2018 at 17:00h (CET).

Please send project applications with supporting materials to proposals@princeclausfund.nl. Only digital applications sent to the email address above and received before the deadline will be considered.