“Europe will only be a public space for all if we learn to dialogue”
8 Mar 2021
In our series of interviews with Culture of Solidarity Fund grantees, meet CEPS!
Who are you?
CEPS is a non-profit association that focuses on the creation of projects and social studies. We have worked for more than 20 years with Transit Projectes, a multidisciplinary team specialised in cultural project management. Based in Barcelona, CEPS and Trànsit Projectes understand cultural processes as a fundamental tool for social development, fostering a more just and cohesive society.
What made you think of the project?
“To pass through the coming times, we will need a great effort of creation, because what was there before no longer serves; it no longer works. Or at least its meaning is canceled or put in parentheses. At the moment at which we find ourselves, an effort of invention is necessary for the ways of relating, of being, and sharing; or, we are going to live in what I would call a diminished (or mutilated or trimmed) reality… Accordingly, what are we going to do? It is the question these catastrophes force upon us: Are we going to continue the same? Or are we going to be able to invent new ways of inhabiting the planet?”
This sentence was shared by the writer and editor Amador Fernández-Savater at a colloquium held in Madrid at Espacio La Atenea, called “To inhabit and govern uncertainty. reflecting together in confusing times” to discuss the most recent events caused by Covid-19 and its possible effects on all aspects of contemporary life. The same questions have been raised collectively, both with our alleged in the intimate space, and with our professional’s teams from Trànsit Projectes, Ceps, ITD, and of course #plantauno. Many doubts and uncertainties currently govern us, and many more questions inhabit us, but in the meantime, echoing Savater, we ask ourselves: What are we going to do?
What will your project contribute to Europe, post-corona?
Megatrends want to develop a tool that enables conversation and helps communities with common concerns or social realities to draw possible maps of value. It also aims to empower people in their life projects and as agents of change.
Megatrends will be an archive and game that allows social workers, creators, creatives, or any professional, to dynamise workgroups and spaces for dialogue and meetings. It will enable participants to imagine, talk and build possible futures. Besides, it will promote collective intelligence and provide a tool for answering urgent questions raised during this Covid-19 related new stage.
How do you envision it to grow from local to pan European?
In the last ten years, Ceps Projectes Socials has specialised in social project management at the European level. It has built an extensive network of socio- cultural organisations allies that work closely with the local territories and the
communities that inhabit them. It has also promoted community participation processes from the cultural, digital, educational, and environmental aspects. We hope that the Megatrends tool can provide a mechanism to all these professionals who lead social community organisations to revitalise their communities, projects, and initiatives.
And – finally – how does your project help to make Europe an open and shared public space for everyone?
Europe will only be a public, open, and shared space for all if we learn to dialogue and listen to each other. By developing meeting places, tools, and processes, we propitiate a fertile ground for promoting participation in equal conditions and providing tools to make people’s voices with fewer opportunities visible and heard.
Megatrends will be a game, an archive of trends, a tool to draw maps and cartographies of values. In essence, Megatrends want to be the space to reflect and listen to the other. At the same time, it aims to be a tool for enabling any European citizen to the opportunity to imagine possible futures for the world we want to inhabit.
Granted: 14500 euros
