Common Purpose Through Differences

Common Purpose Through Differences is one of the two strategic initiatives that provide the core structure for the activities of the Foundation. Initially conceived in 2018, the two initiatives provide a framework for the Foundation’s projects and its core activities.

The projects that fall within the Common Purpose Through Differences initiative are designed to surface the commonalities that connect the multifarious communities within contemporary Europe.

From explorations of political community to representations of history within education and providing a platform for diverse experiences of museum spaces, each project aims to critically engage with and find ways to celebrate the multiplicities within culture and society.

Projects: Sharing European Histories (p.8), Museum in Dialogue (p.9), Evens Lecture Series (p.9), What Makes An Assembly? (p. 10), Voi[e,x,s] (p. 10)

Sharing European Histories

The Sharing European Histories initiative was developed by the Evens Foundation in partnership with EuroClio, the European Association of History Educators. Its aim is to support innovative projects and pioneering strategies that help young people understand the complexity, multiplicity and transnationality of European history.

In 2021, the focus was on the translation and dissemination of the first set of five teaching strategies developed under the initiative. The target audience was educators across Europe.

The strategies include using object biographies, analysing historical figures, deconstructing commemorative practices, studying the roots of important ideas and exploring personal life stories to understand the complexity of history. As they are not linked to a specific subject, they can be applied to many different topics in history curricula and are widely adaptable for educators across Europe.

The team worked with an independent animator to create a short, engaging film promoting the teaching strategies, which was shared through social media, newsletters and other digital platforms.

The Evens Foundation and EuroClio also invited local experts to prepare a webinar series, based on their own experiences of experimenting with the different strategies. This series took place via YouTube in Autumn 2021, and consisted of five pre-recorded sessions and three ‘live’ reflection sessions.

Museum in Dialogue

Museum in Dialogue was a joint initiative of the Evens Foundation and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in collaboration with FMDO vzw and De Veerman vzw. Together with a group of interested visitors, the project was created to explore how museums and their collections can foster new encounters and dialogues with diverse audiences.

In 2021, the Evens Foundation helped coordinate the launch of a small publication, sharing insights and lessons from the process. The publication was targeted at professionals working in other institutions, foundations and similar organisations that deal with a museum or exhibitionary context.

In parallel, a working group was created to focus on the development of a dedicated Museum in Dialogue podcast series with De Veerman vzw. This series, launched in 2021 and published on the audio platform Soundcloud and the website of Koninklijke Museum voor Schone Kunsten van België (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium), sheds fresh light on artworks from the Old Masters collection of these museums.

Both the podcasts and the publication were presented during the conference of the ICOM International Committee for Education and Cultural Action, which focused on the topic of cocreation, in October 2021.

The Evens Lecture Series

The Evens Lecture Series is an ongoing initiative that is a manifestation of the Foundation’s commitment to contribute actively to public debate. The series invites renowned speakers and specialists from different fields and disciplines to discuss and examine the pressing issues of our time and their impact on society through the format of a public lecture.

In 2020, the Evens Foundation planned a series of lectures to take place over a two-year period. The subsequent disruptions and restrictions of Covid-19 forced the Foundation to scale back its ambitions, and only one event was able to take place in 2021.

On 29 November, the renowned economist Ann Pettifor presented her lecture ‘We need an alternative to globalisation - a new internationalism: for the many, not the few’ at Bozar in Brussels.

Pettifor – best known for her prediction of the Great Financial

Crisis in ‘The Coming First World Debt Crisis’ and her subsequent book ‘The Case for The Green New Deal’, published in 2019 – argued that the stabilisation of national and global ecosystems could only be achieved by first transforming the international financial system.

A power transfer from the state to the financial markets had weakened democracy and laid the foundations for financial and ecological crises, she said. Drawing on the work of John Maynard Keynes, historical evidence and recent European Union developments, she explored one possible route towards transformation.

The event concluded with a conversation between Pettifor, ecological economist Tom Bauler (ULB) and political economist and philosopher Jens van ‘t Klooster (KU Leuven), moderated by journalist Mehreen Khan (Financial Times).

Attendance was limited due to uncertainty over lockdown restrictions. Despite this, the lecture reached a wide audience through press coverage and a video of the talk published on the Evens Foundation’s YouTube channel, which has been watched more than 400 times.

What Makes An Assembly?

What Makes An Assembly is a new publication being developed by the Evens Foundation in partnership with Sternberg Press, as part of Assemblies: Modern Rituals –a long-term research project initiated by the Foundation in 2018.

Over the past decade, the world has witnessed a resurgence of popular and citizens’ assemblies, alongside a rise in public protests, occupations and social movements: a symptom of growing disillusionment and defiance against traditional forms of governance and representation, and an increasing demand for a more radical democracy. To begin to understand how and why these forms of assembly are created, what they might mean, and what they might become in the future, demands a transdisciplinary approach to research. This project moves towards this goal, bringing together leading practitioners from the arts and sciences to exchange and explore ideas.

The initial phase of the research – focusing on the role of the citizen assembly during periods of social and political unrest – was conducted in 2019. The Foundation’s ambition was then to create a forum through which practitioners from different disciplines who are connected to assembly making, such as architects, politicians, activists, urban planners, and academics, could gather. However, Covid-19 presented a significant challenge. The publication was developed as a solution: a platform through which ideas and innovations could be generated, shared and discussed. The editors appointed to oversee the publication are Anne Davidian, head of the Evens Foundation’s Paris office, and political scientist Laurent Jeanpierre.

As part of the commissioning process for the publication, the Foundation has invited leading architects and designers to create new proposals, which each present a different potential infrastructure for an assembly. The Foundation has begun working on plans to realise at least one of these experimental projects in the form of an installation at Centre Pompidou, building on the Foundation’s existing partnership with this leading cultural institution.

Voi[e,x,s]

The Evens Foundation and the research centre Theatrum Mundi established the Voi[e,x,s] Research Fellowship in 2019 to investigate how a shared aesthetic experience could enrich the relationship between people and their environment, centred around the transformation of the disused railway depot Chapelle-Charbon in Paris.

While the railway depot is being turned into an urban park and housing, the opera company MDPA - Alexandra Lacroix, composer Marta Gentilucci, and Theatrum Mundi, proposed to capture the process and to create new memories for the people living in the neighbourhood through workshops and performances.

Dimitri Szuter – holder of the Voi[e,x,s] Research Fellowship initiated by Evens Foundation and Theatrum Mundi – worked with Dr John Bingham-Hall on a bilingual publication documenting the performance-making and workshop process and the ways aesthetic experiences can stage encounters between residents and the urban transformations taking place around them. The resulting publication is now available online.