SOPA Congress
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
SOPA is a “different” congress, developed in rural areas, and with which it is intended to promote collective sentiment, the emancipation of knowledge and the co-creation of content and methodologies. In addition, the SOPA Congress intends to explore a new research path that allows understanding the heritage-society relationship and fostering an exchange of knowledge between the academic world and the community through actions that enable connections between people, knowledge and affections.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
The SOPA community (Iberoamerican Network for Social Management of Cultural Heritage) is an international and informal platform from which community management processes of cultural heritage and common goods are planned. Through collaborative dynamics, workshops, interventions in the public space, communication and design, we promote learning, connection, access and transmission of the common goods, activating processes of cultural democracy and the emancipation of knowledge, mainly in rural areas. This community is composed of people and institutions, both European and Iberoamerican, coming from the fields of social sciences, architecture, pedagogics, communication, design and art. It is a flexible group, in which museums, universities, investigation centres and cultural mediators are involved in projects about the connection among citizens and public administrations. The collective from Extremadura UNDERGROUND [Arqueología Patrimonio & Gente] coordinates this network. The network organizes annually the SOPA Congress [International Congress of Heritage Socialisation in Rural Areas] that promotes and consolidates collective sentiment, commitment to the community, the emancipation of knowledge through the spread of knowledge, and the co-creation of content and methodologies. Furthermore, the SOPA Congress aims to explore new research avenues of analysis that allow understanding the heritage-society relationship. It also seeks to promote an exchange of knowledge between the academic world and the community through the use of new tools that can be replicated in different contexts, in order to share processes of scientific knowledge and collective memory. In each edition of the congress, tools, proposals and actions are generated, which enable processes and connections of people, knowledge and affections. The SOPA Congress began its journey in 2013, it has been held in Spain [3 editions], Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Colombia.
Key objectives for sustainability
The Heritage in rural areas, generally are in a situation of administrative neglect, unlike urban heritage which is thought more economically beneficial. However, the rural areas contains much of the preserved and endangered heritage, understood as the setof built and intangible, of all chronologies part of history and local stories. Inland has become the “periphery” of the city (establishing a simplified comparison to the effect of globalization has enabled with regard to the central and peripheral countries). A truly democratic management, taking into account the multiculturalism, must leave the centralism to meet with equity to all sectors. We need a model that addresses too, and particularly to rural and communities inserted on it; as to counterpoise the cultural policies of any establishment that only tend to the dissemination of urban (and even the mediatic). For this reason, in this Congress focused on rural areas, we would like to propose innovative strategies to socialise the cultural heritage, and to receive other proposals as well, based not only on what is already written, but what is to be written also. The target is that all these initiatives have an impact on society, as a way of maintaining this heritage, so everybody can enjoy and revitalise it. Demographic imbalances, aggravated by the abandonment of rural areas, suffered by Spain, put the achievement of the SDGs at risk: there will be no sustainable development or territorial cohesion without a living rural environment, as an environment that manages goods fundamental to all of society. From the SOPA we are aware of the reality of the territory first-hand, and we have verified how the promotion of heritage and popular culture, through community processes, is an end to contribute to achieving many SDGs: achieving safe and sustainable peoples, fostering economic growth, reducing inequality, halting environmental degradation, achieving gender equality and promoting peaceful and inclusive societies.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
With the SOPA Congress we wanted to generate a network of nodes, which were usually disconnected, and which, although from different perspectives, had similar objectives: to make way for citizen participation in the processes of patrimonialization are these part of the set of assets of cultural interest [ culture of the dominant classes], or subaltern heritages or displaced heritages [expanded or community cultural heritages from the decolonial perspective], from diffusion, socialization, education or community management. These different degrees or states of incorporation of citizenship became an important factor when establishing our laboratory methodology. We were used to working in activist spaces, in which citizens position themselves as the protagonists of the actions. We also knew the work with the educational communities and we had shared spaces with the different academic meetings that dealt with topics such as Public Archeology, for example. The problem we faced was how to bring all these realities together in a friendly work space. After an investigation process we did not find an ideal context, so, as activists, we decided to hack into a comfortable space for agents who traditionally investigated from theory and for mediators who investigated from doing, and from there the SOPA emerged as a congress. A congress, with a contemporary image, without abandoning the rural imaginary, which facilitates the participation of new views, languages, tools that make possible different prototypes of expanded heritage under the interested participation of all people, the incorporation of decolonization strategies of knowledge and new governance systems for cultural heritage. All this has contributed to generating a quality event that is allowing us to know and implement new ways in which communities, heritages and territories are interrelated to achieve a more real, more palpable and more sustainable rural.
Key objectives for inclusion
SOPA is a political event. From the moment in which we bet on a way of working, of understanding heritage and its contexts, the implications and support fluctuate. Many have been the public and private institutions that have been part of the organization and development of SOPA: from town halls, universities, research centers, museums, to social entities, such as care centers for people with disabilities, schools, foundations, and different agents and cultural mediators. But really, the strength of SOPA comes from the people. Cultural, folkloric, women's, environmental, and elderly associations, each with its own needs and conflicts. In short, we are facing a hybrid academic/informal space in which the recovery of knowledge and collective memories of territories and communities is encouraged. Before a space for debate and reflection on how to work with the community, in making that culture visible, the problems that we encounter to encourage participation, for the organization of events and projects, or the management of resources to promote the development of rural areas . And all this to promote a new vision of rural spaces, more innovative, more proactive and more involved with their environment and with their memory, making known regional, national and international experiences. However, the aspect of which we are most proud is that of SOPA as an environment of affection and care. We understand that our task is to make care visible as an inclusive and group practice, where respect is exercised by all people, incorporating mediation between equals, empathy and community encounter into their practices, since care transcends people, incorporating the environment and the ways of life of the different communities, as well as taking care of the reception of all the participants and facilitating their immersion in the group, and above all, working on conflicts as shared learning.
Results in relation to category
The SOPA Congress aims to share tools that change the ways of relating to our culture: emancipating knowledge through the expansion of knowledge and the co-creation of content and methodologies. Know the different ways of seeing the cultural heritage, enabling local agents to develop innovative and sustainable cultural and economic initiatives in each territory in a horizontal and bidirectional way. Raising these issues facilitates interested participation, since they can work from what they want to learn and teach, so that all the work to be done is through collective input. The need to approach communities where access to the redistribution of knowledge is complicated on a large scale, but more feasible on a small scale, allows generating of, collective, participatory and mainly, integrative heritage management dynamics. SOPA also incorporates different artistic disciplines to social processes to analyze and diagnose different problems in the territories; It also creates community artistic pieces from the focus of the living arts and performative actions with strategies that affect the cultural ecosystem and the social context, since with the creation of a transit space between the cultural heritage, the territory, its memories , community networks and the institutional cultural model, it is possible to generate new ways of inhabiting and co-governing friendly spaces that critically challenge the community with which we are working. Another of the participation practices that is developed from SOPA is the incorporation of new speech transmission languages that allow generating open creative processes. These languages translate into the incorporation of art as an element that weaves our narratives and that becomes a replicable tool that allows us to place knowledge in current times and spaces. The aim is to give a voice to cultural groups and agents, make visible projects that promote citizen participation and the design of cultural processes from new perspectives.
How Citizens benefit
SOPA, as a collaborative and community-based project, feeds on the synergies generated with the neighbours of the localities that host the congress. In this way, we involve citizens to achieve an environment of greater citizen awareness, at the same time that we exchange experiences with the various actors of the community in a collective and intergenerational way. To achieve this involvement, it is essential to know the local agents, understood as the municipal administration, institutions, associations, public or private entities, the educational community and citizens, to make them aware of the project, what it means and what it will mean for them. Hence the need to plan several meetings throughout the months prior to the congress to design possible actions before and during its development. The benefits-returns of the work carried out over these years since the SOPA Congress can be presented at two levels: territorial and community. From the point of view of the territories, in which they have obtained added value in the implementation and development of projects related to local heritage; in which they have gained recognition from the public by providing them with open and participatory access in the wealth management processes; and in that the territories have gained external recognition by becoming involved both in their heritage and in allowing other forms of wealth generation based on community work. As for the communities, they benefit from the possibility that they can promote the use of new strategies for the social management of heritage; that they can bet on quality cultural tourism linked to heritage and productive identity; that they can promote training activities linked to specific sustainable processes for their territory; that they can promote their participation in the design of strategic lines for rural development; and that they can manage and promote the use of public spaces as spaces for socialization by reactivating or reformulating them.
Innovative character
The fact of choosing the congress format instead of other more dynamic or alternative ones, responds to the fact that a large part of the teams and projects that work on cultural heritage are linked, directly or indirectly, with both the scientific and academic world, and which is a forum in which they are comfortable when it comes to presenting results and experiences. But how do we innovate then? From the point of view of the format, in which we introduce new agents, new languages and new tools that can be adapted to the development of actions related to rural heritage. In which we give a special role to the territory near the venue where the SOPA Congress is held; in which we use tools and common work actions to deal with problems, launch proposals and assume commitments in those aspects of rural heritage that pose both a conceptual and conjunctural problem; and in which we appropriate new spaces and new communication and relationship settings (bars, markets, squares, streets, schools, are some of them). But above all we innovate in the participatory. Because we are involving the community in the entire process, both in planning and in execution; because the community wants everyone to realize that they are the ones who have kept the rural heritage alive; because the rural community also wants the voice, so that it is not always talked about when in most cases it could speak for itself and generate knowledge, instead of always having to receive it; and because in each edition of the congress other tools, other proposals and other actions can be generated that enable processes and connections of people, knowledge and affections.
