Goodbye Intendente

LARGO Residências says goodbye to the Intendente after 10 years. With your support it will be possible to build our next great cultural project.

FOR THE CONTINUITY OF LARGO RESIDÊNCIAS
Our cultural and social cooperative was born more than 10 years ago and we want to continue.

In this difficult period of global pandemic we are also very affected and with the expiration of the rent agreement of our headquarters at Intendente we are going through a period of transition and challenges.

Our aligned consciousness and heart give us a sign to move forward and fight the difficulties that lie ahead. This is how we have always done it because we know that our root is in caring for people and places, in creating a pillar in the form of a common house that embraces culture workers with the local community, always with particular attention to the most vulnerable population regardless of their condition.

In 2020 Before prematurely closing our accommodation unit, during lockdown we opened the doors of our rooms to welcome immigrants infected with the new coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2) who were in recovery but unable to safely confine themselves to their homes.
We did not cancel culture; on the contrary, we joined it to meet those who were most in need.

Now it's time close a door that has always been open to everyone: LARGO Café Studio. Café Estúdio has been for many a safe haven, and also stage for the activities of hundreds of artists from various areas, all of them free of charge, thus becoming a place where access
to culture is provided: a culture that brings together. We hold dear in our memory not only the days with thousands of people in the festivals we
organised but also an almost empty Largo, in our path's beginning, when we would sit and get to know each neighbour, each person who wished the best for this place and not to be kept away from it or to be asked to leave it.

Even though our cultural endeavours have taken place, and will continue to more modestly all around the Neighbourhood, our social businesses, our accommodation unit and our café not only represent what turned us into an example in terms of sustainability in the cultural branch but, above all, the guarantee of work positions to those who most needed them, and to those who saw Intendente as their home, long before its urban reform. This Square (Largo) gave us our name, for it is from it, and in it, that we focus our actions on. It has been a place for constant reunion, care, listening, creation, support, exploration, experiences, failures, achievements, disillusions but we are sure our mission has been
accomplished.

That is all that is at stake at the moment and this fundraising campaign serves to continue our mission, to carry out our activities in the same neighbourhood, but now into a new temporary space: The Barracks - a temporary cultural and social centre. There we want to
continue the creation activities, training and inclusive cultural programmes, resume accommodation with artistic residencies and people in refuge, as well as a café open to the neighbourhood.

Since we do not only think of ourselves, we want to create conditions to, in this temporary centre, welcome other initiatives in the socio-cultural sector and social economy, and strengthen the working conditions of a sector that has been seriously weakened. Continue the network work from a new collaborative and multi-capacity experience, a collaborative ecosystem and local co-governance.
Because culture and inclusion need you!
Always together, always here.
Transform to continue, create to resist.

About the author

The mission of the cultural cooperative LARGO Residências is to contribute to local development, through cultural activities of social inclusion and social businesses that simultaneously ensure their own sustainability. Headquartered in Largo do Intendente (Lisbon), since 2011, where it develops its cultural activities of social inclusion and local development, it starts in 2022 a new cycle, closing its activities in Largo do Intendente and creating an innovative response in the same parish (Arroios), with the creation of a social and cultural centre - THE BARRACKS, where, in
addition to its regular activities, the activity of a network of partners operating in this new common neighbourhood in Largo do Cabeço da Bola is coordinated, from former GNR Barracks.
Over the last 10 years, it has involved in its activity more than:

• 2500 artists (local, national and foreign),
• 2000 community participants (in interactive projects),
• 1000 occasional activities,
• 10 permanent projects.

It also participates in about 8 local and international collaborative networks It has participated in more than 55 national and international conferences. It was one of the important local job creation agents in the Intendente area, having integrated a large percentage of people in different vulnerable positions. Largo Residências was identified as an example of good practices that connect the cultural sector and social inclusion. In 2019, it integrated the ranking of the five largest cooperatives in the Culture branch (2019), contributing to the generation of activity and employment in the Cultural branch, distinguished by Cases (Cooperativa António Sérgio para a Economia Social/António Sérgio
Cooperative for Social Economy). In 2021, it was awarded the Acesso Cultura Prize in the category of Social Accessibility. Largo Residências has developed a variety of local and international partnerships that have also helped promote more inclusive development policies, including the right to accommodation, non-speculative urban development, social economy and responsible tourism.

Budget and due dates

The 20 thousand euros that are intended to be raised in this crowdfunding campaign will guarantee the transition process from the main activities of Largo Residências to the GNR Quartel, namely artistic residencies and social inclusion. This amount will make it possible to pay for the first works to adapt the spaces for artistic and social creation and residency, namely rehearsal rooms, workshops and temporary residence rooms.

LARGO Residências will not sit idly by – this crowdfunding is just the beginning of a process of raising other support. We are raising support mainly in materials for the works, with the value raised for human resources, and as is our usual practice, using people in situations of social vulnerability to create these work teams, thus being another indirect way of social support.

We expect to start the process of recovering the spaces in the month of May or June, with the start of operation of these spaces between July and September 2022.

Images

Documents

• Largo Campain in English

  pdf • 50.76 KB