EUTEENS4GREEN Projects

The vision is to show sustainable alternatives for growing food, managing water, and lifestyle practices, create experiential learning situations and directly engage people from the area to get involved. \n\"We aim to organise a tripartite series of non-formal, educational and creative events around ancient territorial knowledges and environmental justice in Almería. Concretely, the events are an artisan’s weekend with workshops, food and music, followed by an artist residency that hosts six regional artists and artisans in \nSunseed for ten days, ending with Sunseed’s annual educational festival for environmental justice, “Festival del Agua”.\nThe vision of Arte(sania) - interweaving with territorial knowledge - is to show sustainable alternatives for growing food, managing water, and lifestyle practices, create experiential learning situations and thereby directly engage people from the area to get involved with our association. \nThis ensemble of events has four aims. Firstly, to facilitate the continuation of traditional knowledges and practices that are more sustainable, by holding the space for an intergenerational gathering that values and prioritises ancestral knowledges of the region. Secondly, to provide local artists with the basic needs, such as space, time and materials, to work on artistic outcomes that raise awareness about the environmental struggles in the area while imagining a socially just and ecologically harmonious future. Thirdly, to gather local activists, artists and young people to informally learn about the local environment and the challenges we face, while having time to celebrate the community by sharing food and music. Lastly, we aim to enhance our association's capacities to host education events towards the green transition through educating staff members and networking in the area.\nThe three events serve as inspirations to create innovative solutions for a more widely accessible green transition, and hence environmental justice, within the area of Almería. This is because current Almerían land and water management systems, especially the agro industry, are unsustainable. Beyond being the \ndriest region in Europe, Almería’s economic well-being is based in the production of large amounts of vegetables for export all year round. Looking for a solution to this problem, Sunseed has become a living laboratory of innovative solutions to land and water management through the use of ancestral knowledge and practices: keeping resources such as water and food production in local cycles and educating about these regenerative practices. Sunseed is an educational space to get to know and practise a regenerative lifestyle. \"

\"Sunseed Desert Technology (current and online)\nThe organisational and educational capacities of the team of Sunseed volunteers working on the realisation of the project are strengthened on various levels. The volunteers organise the event series and in the process educate themselves through researching on the topics, getting in touch with local associations and \npeople engaged in the topics, and acquiring knowledge around a specific topic to give a workshop. Thereby, Sunseed volunteers strengthen their abilities to function as multiplicators of social ecological change. \nSunseed’s online followers are aware of what is happening in Sunseed, gain knowledge about ancestral knowledges and how they can serve as tools for a green transition. Booklet readers are able to reproduce education about these knowledges and apply them to their contexts. \nAlmeria Region\nQuantitatively, we expect around 60 participants at the artisan weekend, 6 artists within the residency and 150 participants at the festival del agua. From these participants, we expect 20 to give a workshop/talk at the artisan weekend. We expect 5 of the 20 to give a workshop/talk at the artist residency. Finally, we expect 20 people to give a workshop at the festival del agua from whom at least 5 should be sourced from the prior events. Qualitatively, the participants in the events learn about ancestral territorial knowledges and environmental justice in the region and or shared their knowledges. People leave the events more \nknowledgeable about the topics and are inspired to get involved with Sunseed on a more regular basis and/or apply what they learned to their living contexts. People who give talks, workshops or tours at the events are feeling that their knowledges are valuable, are empowered through having had an audience at the event and expanded their networks. Activists, academics and practitioners engaged in environmental activism in Almeria connected to people from Los Molinos, Sorbas and neighbouring villages and are more aware of what is happening in Sunseed, bringing these knowledges back to their contexts. The participants of the region should follow Sunseed’s social media and be considering to come to further events of the association or get involved in other ways such as joining as a volunteer and becoming a multiplicator for the green \ntransition themselves. \nArt Residency\nArtists and artisans are granted the possibility to have a space to learn sustainable artistic practices from each other and from the artisans in the region as well as getting inspired by the regenerative lifestyle in Sunseed. We aim for an impact of the residency in the artists’ work: shifting artistic production to art that \nraises awareness and engages their audiences within the green transition. At the festival del agua, artists and artisans have space to showcase and sell their works and expand their networks. The artworks are deemed to have impact on the community and other audiences such as participants in the festival del agua \nas well as online.\"

communication@sunseed.org.uk

https://www.sunseed.org.uk/