Proyecto Pregunta, public debates

​As part of its 9th edition, Festival Verão Azul hosted Chilean collective, Mil Metros 2, with "Proyecto Pregunta", an artistic and civic device presented in more than 100 cities across both South America and Europe, including Faro.

"Proyecto Pregunta" aims to generate debates, make them go viral and foster them in public places, producing open questions that activate collective knowledge in different places and among varying communities. As it got underway in Faro, the project encompassed five actions carried out with different groups, as displayed in the images below. The public was invited to participate in a set of activities in which they were encouraged to question their views on various social topics, fostering new discussions and a new sense of civic engagement. These events later culminated in street displays in which a giant structure would "wander" around the city of Faro presenting the results of the work and simultaneously encouraging the population to ask new questions.
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Traveller Community - Horta da Areia Community Centre

PIEF Students - João de Deus Secondary School

Cultural Associations and Agents - Musicians' Association

Children - E. B. 1 Penha School

Island Residents - Hangars Island Residents' Association

Every participant was challenged to think about their local area and its problems, helping artists formulate questions about various social topics. The project ended with the pinpointing of questions that best represented the population’s collective thinking. Volunteers also took part in the project, helping run specific events with each of the communities and displaying the results in various areas of the city.
Want to know which questions were asked in Faro?
​Click HERE

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More about the Mil M2 collective
Mil M2 is a Chilean interdisciplinary artistic collective whose first action was temporarily occupying vacant areas, aiming to promote events and meetings in which knowledge is exchanged and shared.
Currently nomadic, the collective proposes to work on creating artistic processes that allow for civic and political debates to take place in public places.

More about "Proyecto Pregunta":
Proyecto Pregunta is a participatory civic mechanism centered on generating, visualising and the collective viralisation of debates in public spaces. Its main objective is to activate areas and communities by generating knowledge, collectively.
Each activation uses a set of tools geared towards civic involvement, encouraging the collective questioning of social issues.
Proyecto Pregunta is a critical mechanism geared towards interventions using civic participation methodologies. In doing so, the project seeks to question and open up new levels of community awareness and civic involvement.

More about Festival Verão Azul:
Festival Verão Azul is a transdisciplinary festival dedicated to promoting and sharing contemporary creation in the Algarve. It is directed by art duo Ana Borralho & João Galante and produced by cultural association casaBranca.
Its first edition having taken place over 4 days in Lagos in 2011, most of the contributing artists were Portuguese in its very beginning. Since then, the festival has grown and extended towards the eastern Algarve, building public loyalty, complicity and partnerships with an increasing number of agents and institutions – most notably co-production partnerships with Cineteatro Louletano and Teatro das Figures, as well as it being added to the Algarve 365’s programme.
A unique event in the region, it has continuously provided theatre, dance, performance, music, cinema and visual arts projects, bringing together works by both Portuguese and foreign artists. Now, as an established, recognised festival, it also welcomes more experimental projects developed by young creators.
In 2018, VERÃO AZUL started a new cycle, becoming a biennial festival. In the interim years, festival organisers, participants and guest artists will work towards achieving the festival’s artistic intention of decentralising and deepening relationships with local contexts, communities and the city’s artistic fabric, promoting creative residencies, research laboratories and co-productions, the results of which will be presented in each edition of the festival.

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