The Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which was passed on 21 June 2012 in the Bolivian Senate, aims to promote full development in harmony and balance with nature, ensuring Mother Earth's continuing capacity to regenerate her components and life systems and the revival and strengthening of local and ancestral knowledge. Promoted by President Evo Morales, the rights of Mother Earth are a universal declaration for the preservation of Planet Earth. This law introduces the indigenous ancestral concept of the Earth/Nature as being a living being with rights. Its legal text establishes Planet Earth as a a collective subject of public interest, to ensure the exercise and protection of its rights.

In collaboration with Programa Educativo dos Jardins Gulbenkian

The fifth edition of the IWL Summer School, wich is based at the University of Harvard, will be held from 22 June to 16 July at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, bringing together for the first time in Portugal a group of internationally renowned specialists in Comparative Studies and World Literature. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation will host the activities programmed for 25 June, which will include a plenary lecture and a panel discussion.

The lecture, which will be given by the Cape Verdean writer Filinto Elísio, will consist of a reflection upon the visibility of Portuguese-speaking African Literatures within the framework of World Literature, questioning the place of national literatures, particularly in an African context, in our present-day globalised world. This will be followed by a panel discussion composed of David Damrosch (Harvard U.), Debjani Ganguly (Australian National U.), Jale Parla (Istanbul Bilgi U.) and Jonathan Arac (Pittsburgh U.), which will debate the current panorama of World Literature Studies. Both sessions will be in English, with simultaneous translation to Portuguese.

Presentation of the ebooks Uncertain Spaces: Virtual Configurations in Contemporary Art and Museums (edited by Helena Barranha and Susana S. Martins) and Museus sem lugar: ensaios, manifestos e diálogos em rede (edited by Helena Barranha, Susana S. Martins and António Pinto Ribeiro).

Followed by the launch of the online exhibition unplace, networked art: places-between-places (Curated by: António Pinto Ribeiro and Rita Xavier Monteiro). 

unplace – A Museum Without a Place: Intangible Museography and Virtual Exhibitions is a scientific and artistic project that explores the possibilities and limitations of technology and digital expression, particularly within the internet, in the form of theoretical experiments and a visual art exhibition titled unplace, networked art: places-between-places. unplace is a project jointly coordinated by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (the Gulbenkian Next Future Programme), the Instituto Superior Técnico – Universidade de Lisboa (through IST-ID and ICIST) and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Instituto de História da Arte). It is also funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (state budget ref: EXPL/CPC-EAT/1175/2013).

Three sessions cycle dedicated to the Comic Strip, the Detective Novel and Science Fiction.

This lecture is intended to share and offer up for analysis the different paths that have been followed since independence by these three African States, reflecting upon the possible models for future development in such distinct economies as those of Angola and Mozambique, on the one hand, and Cape Verde, on the other hand. The aim is to encourage reflection on the importance in these different economies of such questions as employment, income distribution, access to basic services, education and training, and the impact of the new technologies in these rapidly changing societies.

Gathering the contributions of researchers, artists and curators, this conference aims to examine the different ways by which contemporary art and museums are reconfigured in virtual environments.

4th Observatory of Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean

The aim of this cycle of debates is to discuss historical and present-day experiences that can help us to form an inventory of the different types of power relations. It is a programme that cuts not only across the fields of art and culture, but also across politics and economics. It involves the discussion of political events, aesthetic movements and theoretical debates, and focuses on such diverse subjects as literary texts, political actions, film images, academic currents of thought and even trade flows.

Special attention will be devoted to the dynamics of territorialisation that are involved in power relations, ranging from colonial expansion to the globalisation process, from the formation of metropolises to the transformation of nature.

The inspiration for this programme is the critique that will be made of colonial domination in African, Asian and South American territories and societies, looking at the alternatives being developed in these same contexts, both to the new forms of western domination and to the powers that have since established themselves in the post-colonial world.

Diogo Duarte, Inês Galvão and José Neves (Coordinators)

The media’s treatment of African news tends to be dominated by a ‘single story’ perspective, as elucidated by the Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie. This 3rd Africa and Latin America Observatory, organized jointly with ACEP, has been designed to accommodate many different stories, to question old stereotypes and to bring fresh approaches and new projects into contact with each other: signs of new relationships?

Fátima Proença, coordinator of the 3rd edition and director of ACEP.

Ever since the time of Herodotus, the history of North Africa has also been the history of its imaginary. Beyond its geographical, religious or political borders, this region has been created and recreated in forms, images, words and sounds that are as different from one another as those of Ingres, Le Corbusier, Dizzie Gillespie and Yves Saint-Laurent, but also as different as those of Ibn Battuta, Umm Kulthum or Abdellatif Kechiche. The profound changes that have recently taken place in the streets and political regimes of the region’s three new democratic States have opened up a whole new field for creativity, but also for the development of specific projects, for the artists and designers of the Maghreb. At a time when a whole region is reinventing itself, in what way can art, but above all design, contribute towards our questioning of these imaginaries and our discovering new places for the imagination of its creators and citizens?

In suggesting as a research topic the problems involved in the management of cultural and social organisations, what we have in mind is the fact that in many Latin American and African countries these two types of management, as well as many of their contents, are very similar. There are many situations and case studies in which the two types of management have become totally fused together.

The present is confused, the future very uncertain, we know very little about one another, about what we have in common and what is different between us, but can be acted upon in order to change it. And certainly one of the least spectacular ways of doing this, not necessarily grabbing the headlines but nonetheless effective and, above all, fundamental, is through research, or rather through the use of the various research methods and protocols and the production of theory.