Mexe - International Art and Community Festival, which will return to Porto from September 16 to 22, challenges all citizens to contribute to organize the festival in an alternative way.
Mexe - International Art and Community Festival, which will return to Porto from September 16 to 22, challenges all citizens to contribute to the organization of the festival in an alternative way.
This event is developed in a community logic, involving more than 200 citizens in the most varied functions of organization and decision making. The programming is discussed in community forums, the graphic elements are the result of workshops with the local community, part of the accommodation is supportive of the groups welcomed, programming is enhanced and decentralized occupying associations of residents, public spaces, unconventional places of the city.
Mexe strives to create a space for participation that can redefine our actions and ways of living together. A space that needs the support of all of society to persist in this desire to create alternatives to the current modes of production and our daily life.
This campaign is intended to support the food and accommodation of a group of 7 participants who, despite an exhaustive process of raising funds and funding, we have so far been unable to do so.
Throughout 4 editions, from 2011 to 2017, MEXE counted on more than 20 000 spectators and more than 1200 participants from 18 countries, integrating proposals of the most varied artistic languages, fields of intervention and spaces of the city.
For a week, Mexe summons Porto and the country to question the current logics of life that translate into impasses that we live as a collective human. Through four programmatic axes, Thought, Presentation, Formation and Documentation, the festival proposes meetings based on participatory, communitarian, horizontal and diverse logics. Consistent with its principles, MEXE's programming privileges the integration of projects with communities that are socially distant from the cultural offer, calling new actors to the stage and, thus, questioning the common places of artistic creation, policies to create new audiences and protagonists and the place of culture as a space for building social cohesion.
In this edition the festival summons 412 people, from 28 groups, from 6 countries for a total of 70 actions in 16 spaces of Porto, in an intense effort of decentralization and connection between center and periphery, to which more than 100 scientific researchers in the scope of Community Artistic Practices in a co-organization between 9 universities.
The program involves all citizens, including young people, the most disadvantaged population, people with disabilities, the unemployed, young people with educational measures and the homeless.
Lugre - Câmara Municipal de Ílhavo
About the author
Mexe is a co-organization between PELE and MEXE - Cultural Association.
PELE was created in Oporto in 2007 as a result of the desire to inhabit a crossroads between Art and the Community, and that this was constructed as an exercise of citizenship and social transformation, when placing the Subject (s), and their view of the world at the center of the creative process, especially those more socially and culturally peripherized.
It is organized in four areas of action: Creation, Programming, Training and the Theater Center of Oprimido do Porto, and for over ten years has developed multiple creations, work methodologies and systematized thought processes in a perspective of deepening and consolidation of the broad and fruitful field of Community Artistic Practices.
It develops its work in a logic of intersection of disciplines and sectors such as culture, social cohesion, politics, education, justice, health, the environment. Its action is guided by the principle of building processes and artistic products that reveal aesthetic quality, ethical commitment and effectiveness with regard to individual and social empowerment. It has as principle the documentation of creative processes, in written and audiovisual format, allowing the dissemination of its practices and an increase of the potential for reflection. The diversity of working contexts is also highlighted in rural, urban, academic, municipal theaters, theater festivals, prison contexts, among others.
MEXE Cultural Association is a non-profit association that organizes a festival, in the context of the national and international cultural panorama, as a space for valorization and dissemination of artistic projects that cross different languages and communities based on the dialogue between creation, public space and participation, empowering a holistic approach to culture and artistic creation. Within its activity, it develops a programming model in a participatory logic, from its conception to its implementation, integrating several formal and informal actors in the various phases of this process. It deepens the decentralization of its programming, extending it to territories with less access to the creation, production and artistic enjoyment, supporting proposals that are inscribed in unconventional and more peripheral spaces, with special focus on the approaches to the public space. It stimulates the participation and exchange of national and international artists, allowing the diversification of proposals, artistic languages, contexts and geographical origins, privileging proposals that are closely related to the local communities where the projects are inserted.
Porto Sentido - NTO Porto/ PELE
Budget and due dates
The campaign and amounts requested are intended to guarantee accommodation and meals for a group of 7 persons involved in Mexe.
From September 16 to 22, 2019 we will host more than 400 participants from 6 countries in 70 actions in the field of Community Artistic Practices, involving a great physical, intellectual, economic and emotional investment of more than 200 people.
The project has been in the implementation phase since January 2018, based on a community outreach organization that has engaged in a continuous effort to raise support and partnerships. During this period, more than 400 public and private entities were contacted, which received the project positively, but did not translate into sufficient effective support for this edition.
September 16 - 22
Accommodation (7 participants x 6 nights x 30 € / night) - 1260 €
Food (7 participants x 6 days x 10 € / day) - 600 €
PPL Commissions: € 184.50
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