About

Horizon Europe is the EU’s key funding programme for research and innovation. Following the Multiannual Financial Framework Midterm Review (MTR) decision, the indicative funding amount for Horizon Europe for the period 2021-2027 is EUR 93.5 billion.

It tackles climate change, helps to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and boosts the EU’s competitiveness and growth.

The programme facilitates collaboration and strengthens the impact of research and innovation in developing, supporting and implementing EU policies while tackling global challenges. It supports creating and better dispersing of excellent knowledge and technologies.

It creates jobs, fully engages the EU’s talent pool, boosts economic growth, promotes industrial competitiveness and optimises investment impact within a strengthened European Research Area.

Legal entities from the EU and associated countries can participate.

Source

Programme

CONVIVIUM is an interdisciplinary and intersectorial coalition of public and private European partners whose main objective is to bring a cultural dimension to the European Green Deal through the leveraging of the material, semiotic, and symbolic power of food. Food touches all of our lives: it is the transversal experience we share. As such, we consider food cultures as “living heritage” that reflect changes in society and contribute to local well-being with wide-reaching impacts.

CONVIVIUM mobilizes numerous creative and transformative forces in the fields that inform the New European Bauhaus to ensure sustainability and positive societal transformation through the medium of food heritage. It offers sustainable, cultural-based solutions which will bring about a range of cultural and economic applications available to different target groups. They include architecture-and-design-based prototypes that will support farmers and agricultural cooperatives to work in symbiosis with the environment, with tradition, and with state-of-the art advances; cultural events and interventions that bring food, the arts, and the humanities together to positively change the mindsets of food producers and consumers; new organizational models that champions inter-cultural, generational, and intersectional visions through the medium of food across local populations; and digital tools to reinforce the presence of food heritage in institutions such as museums and historical sites.

CONVIVIUM will achieve this commitment supported by solid managerial, scientific, collaborative, and technical structures, which are in constant dialogue to ensure that the unlocking of food heritage translates into solutions grounded in the needs and opportunities of local communities, in state-of-the-art social science and humanities approaches and methods, and in synergies between traditional crafts and cutting-edge technological developments.

Locations

  • The Lofoten Islands (NO)
    Included in the Norwegian Tentative List for inclusion as UNESCO World Heritage (since 2002).

  • The city of Coimbra (PT)
    University of Coimbra, Alta and Sofia: UNESCO World Heritage site (since 2013).

  • Flanders (BE)
    Home to several UNESCO world heritage sites. Deeply agricultural, Flanders has over 23,000 farms despite its small geographical area. Densely populated, Flanders also hosts a diverse migrant and student population.

  • Rotterdam (NL)
    The biggest harbour of Europe and the most diverse city in the Netherlands has a multicultural population, largely comprised of minorities from around the globe, with very different food heritages.

  • Gdańsk (PL)
    Gdańsk is over a thousand years old, regarded as a symbolic place for the outbreak of the Second World War, as well as the start of the communist collapse in Central Europe. Gdańsk is a city of many cultural influences and geographical hybridity.

  • Basque Regions (FR, SP)
    Cross-border regions sharing language, history, and viticultural, agricultural, and shepherding practices, each with distinct identities. Home to unique food and wine AOPs, the French and Spanish Basque regions hold great potential for cross-border diplomacy.

Methodologies

The key methodologies keep up with the spirit of ethic of collaboration in resonance with the notions of shared heritage and conviviality, in which the idea of collaboration means “co-labor” and the idea of singular individuals in collaboration become “we”.

CONVIVIUM solutions draw on an approach described as the “ontological turn”, which questions that things have inherent essences, that entities have “natural” qualities, and that objects have a stable existence and fixed attributes. The corresponding methods of research and practice are relational and performative of the social: they do not simply describe the world but also enact it. Scholars, creative agents, and citizens become part of a practice of handling and intervening in the world, of enacting one of its versions or bringing it into being. Concomitant to this is more-than-human thinking, which challenges the human-centric worldview that has dominated Western thought.

This perspective is crucial to our redefinition of food heritage through a conviviality lens, as it emphasizes that humans are one part of an interdependent ecological community including plants, animals, ecosystems, and other non-living entities, whose interests have to be incorporated in decision making. More-than-human thinking is at the core of the Zoöp model, developed by the Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam.

This organizational model focuses on the exploration, creation, and sheltering of cooperation and coexistence between all forms of life, therefore matching our notion of conviviality as a politics of mutual nurturing. All the solutions proposed in this Project are also guided by design thinking and participative deliberation, which implies an iterative process aimed at understanding and empathizing with stakeholders, challenging assumptions, redefining problems, and creating and testing the solutions. Central to these are brainstorming and mapping sessions, workshops, and hybrid forums. The only and main methodological challenge is the pervasiveness of dominant ideas and routine ways of doing “things as usual”.

This challenge will be overcome by demonstrating the capacities acquired by the consortium members, such as anticipatory thinking, interpersonal skills, critical thinking, and mindsets that champion empathy, solidarity, and co-labor.

Objectives


SO1. To redefine food heritage (and cultural heritage at large)

In order to make food heritage more apt to address pressing ecological and societal challenges (e.g. climate change, loss of biodiversity, cultural loss, decreasing intergenerational contact and solidarity, and advances of intolerance and authoritarianism) a new action and research framework will be developed. CONVIVIUM draws on well-established cultural heritage models based on adscription (e.g. UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, FAO’s Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, or France’s Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires) to progressively depart from them and produce one inclusive model of co-evolutive nature. This will be done through the systematic integration of the progress and outcomes of the actions proposed by the consortium, the championing of community involvement, and intersectoral dialogue and communication. Tools assessing the impact of the policy reports, open public events, white papers, and communication strategies which inform the new model will be developed.


SO2. To revitalize traditional, sustainable food practices

CONVIVIUM blends food tradition, sustainability, and innovation to develop green and inclusive solutions for leveraging the full potential of food and agricultural landscapes, and the knowledge associated with them). These include the collaborative design, prototyping, and implementation of cultivable gardens and viticultural landscapes, a future-oriented and socially- inclusive kitchen, environmentally-friendly vineyard architecture, speculative storytelling, artistic exhibitions and performances, and a series of digital solutions addressing both the historical ties that make up community (some of them forgotten or at risk of being forgotten) and the timely ecological challenges affecting our food systems. Put together, these solutions seek to create experiences that generate a positive impact on European communities, which will be evaluated on the basis of the interest and acceptance of local communities, market promoters, and end users.


SO3. To establish food heritage as an important asset for culture, identity and inclusion, economy, tourism and territorial economic competitiveness

CONVIVIUM seeks to ensure the transformative impact of its renewed vision of food heritage beyond the project duration through the anchoring of its innovative solutions to cultural initiatives led by civil society organizations and to the economic activities of the food and tourism industries. This will be achieved through the careful identification of groups targeted by the solutions, the inclusion of interested stakeholders into the different stages of development of the solutions (so they respond to factual needs since their inception), and through effective strategies to attract stakeholder and consumer interest at the phase of implementation or market phase.


SO4. To position citizens as food heritage stakeholders by promoting the reconnection of people to their local ecosystems

CONVIVIUM recognizes that the ecological crisis is a cultural crisis; it is a crisis of relationship with the life surrounding us, and that and the way forward lies in building reciprocity, respect, and care into the ways we relate to each other and to the environment. The solutions proposed by CONVIVIUM uphold the aesthetic, sustainable and inclusive dimension of food to promote new modes of ecological bonding with the earth.3 CONVIVIUM will conduct art-based, scalable solutions in seeding, planting, tasting, and cooking; foster sustainable landscaping in cultivated lands and heritage sites through synergies between crafts and novel industrial techniques; and create immersive food experiences brought up by exhibitions and digital technologies for citizens to gain awareness of the interdependence of life forms and to appreciate food heritage as a kind of care that enables new ways of living together and a sense of belonging to the living community.