Four villages located in the Fundão council will receive ten urban art interventions, created for the project “Fund’Arte – Creative Villages”, which is part of EDP Foundation’s Public Art programme.
Directed towards rural areas for the purpose of disseminating access to art and getting the population involved in new cultural experiences, EDP Foundation’s Public Art programme fosters local development by implementing public art projects in rural settings.
Over the course of one year, the project in Fundão will involve the transformation, rehabilitation and improvement of facilities in the parish councils of Alcaria, Capinha, Pero Viseu and Vale de Prazeres, by means of 10 distinct installations.
These interventions will be part of a tourist itinerary resulting from a partnership between EDP Foundation and the Fundão municipal council, supported by EDP Distribution. They will be created by Nuno Cunha, a visual artist who has been developing curation projects, and Guga Liuzzi, who has been experimenting with several formats in visual and street art. These artists will be joined by Joana Valadão and Mariana Santos, the two winners of the “Illustrate your Homeland” competition, whose result was announced on 28 June.
The project will include community assemblies which will bring together the artists and the local residents. The artists will be tasked with demystifying the role played by art, and the residents will be invited to provide suggestions and to share local stories and customs which might be used as a source of inspiration for the works created.
The first assemblies will take place on 5 and 7 July, and are scheduled to occur again in September, at which time will present their intervention proposals for the selected spaces. In Fundão’s case, the programme is expected to extend until the beginning of Spring 2020, at which time the works will be revealed.
EDP Foundation’s Public Art programme, which began in 2015, uses art as an instrument for social inclusion. To date, over 80 artistic interventions have been created in the Algarve, Alentejo, Ribatejo, Médio Tejo and Trás-os-Montes, distributed across 40 locations, with works by over 35 artists, including Xana, Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Mariana A Miserável and Manuel João Vieira.
