If building a bridge does not enrich the consciousness of those who work on it, then the bridge should not be built.
Franz Omar Fanon
Culturgest and Alkantara chose to focus their efforts on supporting existing independent initiatives, and especially the UNA (Uniaõ Negra das Artes) action towards dismantling the structural racism in the Portuguese arts institutions and reaffirming the right of the afro-descendant communities to tell their stories and histories on stage and beyond. The final goal will be the writing of a Good Practices Manual adapted to the Portuguese context.
As a starting point of the collaboration, on November 20, 2023, as part of the COMMONSTORIES annual meeting, Culturgest organized Reframing Authority and Authorship in the Arts: Weaving Lines of Reparation, a series of conferences and workshops. At a historical moment in which the concept of diversity tends to become meaningless in discourses about culture, this programme curated by Raquel Lima has addressed the dimensions of authority and authorship in order to facilitate the thinking and implementation of radical and reparative insurrections in the cultural sector. How to repair what is repairable in the artistic sector in Portugal?
The morning was dedicated to a theoretical and Practical Workshop, Anti-Racist Lines for art/education, attended by professionals from different Portuguese performing art institutions as well as universities. In the afternoon were proposed three publics talks or round tables open to the public: Fanon Pharmacy – Grammars of the Blue by Vânia Gala, a round table From the Authority of inertia to the radicality of the repairable with Anabela Rodrigues, Apolo de Carvalho, Cristina Roldão, Gessica Correia Borges and Kitty Furtado and a talk by Jota Mombaça on the notions of subject and author, as well as their constitutive limit.
