 Good afternoon everyone. Dear friends, welcome to our city of Porto. When we were challenged last July to host the IETM meeting, we looked at this invitation with some pride and with some apprehension. Normally, these plenary meetings are organized with one-and-a-half years time lag with that sort of advance. But we quickly decided that it would be possible and that it would be a unique opportunity to show a little bit about Porto, about the cultural institutions we have in the city, our artists and our companies. Porto is a living example of a city in continuous transformation when it comes to culture, tourism, business, environment, sustainability as well. After we had the Porto 2001 European capital of culture and a complete change of the city's cultural policy in the last four years, we look at culture as a key of public policies, especially when we increased the role of Porto as another center on both national and international levels. Other centers' paths, perspectives, practices, a broad topic connected to the reality and cultural positioning of Porto today is the starting point for the IETM plenary meeting. IETM's first return to Portugal in 20 years. It was in Lisbon 20 years ago. Since then, the artistic geography itself has become more dynamic than ever and I think Porto had an important role to play in the cultural field. How do we focus points on today's maps evolve and how do the centers shift and the brieferees transform? How does art relate to the process of transforming centers of creation, dissemination and decision-making? IETM Porto is a rare opportunity for the Portuguese art scene to meet the international artistic community and enhance its presence within the international context. During four days, a wide range of cultural and knowledge spaces of the city of Porto will be hosting debates, workshops, discovery tours and the artistic program based on DDD, our festival, and connected with a local artistic community with a presentation of six theaters, companies and eight dance performances. I'm sure that it will be an opportunity for strengthening the positioning of Porto and its commitment to the performing arts, a space for complementary encounters, a context for provocation and innovation, an opportunity to reinforce the current vision and perspectives for the future towards the sustainability of the local structures and cultural policies from Porto to the country, to Portugal, to the world. During the last weeks, we have been discussing again arts and culture in Portugal. As usual, there are two arguments. There are those, and I'm in favor of those, who favor that cultural is paramount to development of our society. You can't talk about sustainability if you don't talk about culture. Others, however, tend to believe and are returning to the beliefs that culture is about subsidies. It is very important that we, who are on the first group, win against the second group. And also because of that, it is so important that all of you are here today. So thank you very much for coming to Porto. Finally, I want to thank Nan van Houten, the president of IETM, Thiago Gedders, director of the municipal theater of Porto and DD Festival, Paula Verenda, director of general directorate of the arts of Portugal. Also, the Ministry of Culture is not with us today for the support, and in particular, the cabinet of the secretive state of culture of Miguel Longado for the enthusiastic teamwork that from the very first hour has supported this project. And last but not least, the great team of IETM Porto, because they have made it happen in a very short period of time with limited resources. Thank you very much. Enjoy. Thank you, Rui Moreira. There will be more moments in this meeting that you can hear this man speak, and I can tell you, you will envy Porto for having a mayor that has such a big heart for the arts. My name is Nan van Houten, secretary general of IETM, and I won't start with my opening and welcoming before I remind us of the last time I was speaking to you as an IETM crowd, which was on behalf of the sad loss of our dear member Anna Cresak in Brussels. Anna was participating in the meeting in Brussels on behalf of Creative Scotland, and she was killed by an accident, a road accident. Well, I couldn't start without mentioning her name, and now we can open our next meeting in Porto. Ben Vindo, welcome. 20 years ago, I visited my first IETM meeting in Lisbon, apart from an unforgettable night in a small Fado cafe in Alfama, which was not part of the IETM program, of course. My strongest memory of that meeting is my great surprise to discover a dance sector that was extremely vital, fresh, and in many perspectives, advanced in comparison with what I was used to see in the northern and western parts of Europe. This young Portuguese dance scene by then convinced me that the head start can also put you backwards. While in my environment new technologies were still scarcely discovered on stage, here technological developments and opportunities seemed to go hand in hand with a new dance dramaturgy and experiments in choreography. Audiences showed curiosities. Dance centers, festivals, and facilities for dance popped up. At this periphery of Europe, something extremely important was taking place, which soon after started to conquer the world. And here we are, in Porto. Since that date, 20 years ago, the Great Recession has hit Portugal and its arts world with force. And at this moment, I would really advise you to read the three articles on Portuguese arts life and the mapping, which are in the mail that you received last Tuesday, to prove that I'm right. IETM seems to be welcomed at yet another crucial moment for the contemporary performing arts. Portugal is achieving the impossible, a fast economic growth, bringing new opportunities for the arts. And of course, this goes hand in hand with the challenges of fast growth, gentrification, touristification, commercialization, we all know. But moreover, it also brings, again, the vitality and seemingly quite unified arts field in focus. And again, I have the feeling we all can learn from what we see happening here in Porto. Artists trying to process Portuguese colonial history, an active policy on inclusion and accessibility of artworks, a municipality that has decided to put arts and culture on top of its agenda and that supports an arts field that is able to raise its voice, as the recent protests has shown and most remarkable a voice that is heard by a ministry of culture. Our last IETM plenary was in Brussels, the center of the European project which is struggling to survive. That meeting boarded title can be talk, aiming at the opportunity and necessity to break out of our silo, our cocoon, our comfort zone, and to stop preaching to the choir. But maybe we forgot the most important, which is that it's not as much about preaching as it should be about listening. So in Porto, I invite you to listen to the voices coming from the other centers than your own, to their journeys, their processes, and their practices because that is what IETM is about, getting to know each other in order to enable each of us to practice in real life the strongest quality of our art sector, being the power of identification and imagination. And before I hand over to our host in this beautiful building, this beautiful theater, Thiago Guedes, who is the director, I would like to remind you that IETM secretariat has incited by some members and supported by the board, by the advisors, and by the associate members during the last two years, developed a strategy on inclusion and diversity. We will discuss this strategy during the talks and listens on Saturday afternoon, and it will be brought to vote during the general assembly. So I would really advise you and beg you, if you didn't yet, to read the draft of this strategy and to fill in the short survey. The links to both of those are in the same mail that are already referred to, the one that you received Tuesday. If you can't find it there, then you can find it on the forum, on the home page of IETM website. That's it for now. What rests is to wish you all a wonderful, inspiring, and enriching experience in IETM Porto. Thank you. Hello, my name is Thiago Guedes and I'm director of the city theater and the festival years of ensign. Good afternoon and welcome to our theater. I want to start by thanking Rui Moreira, our amazing mayor, for believing that we will be able to organize the ATM meeting at the same time of DDD festival. Also, Nan, thank you very much for the invitation you have given us. I would like to use this opportunity to wish you the greatest success for your future projects after the ATM challenge. Last months have been intense with the continuous work between the ATM team in Brussels and the local team at Porto. From the advisor content committee composed by Portuguese ATM members and other relevant cultural partners of the city, passing by the Porto Municipal Theater and DDD festival teams, we have all worked hard to make these days memorable. There are many people who helped us to make possible this adventure and would like and would be an endless list of names to mention. Whatever, I think it's important for thanks. The IETM Porto coordination team, Bruno Costa, Daniel Villar, Ana Rita Feijão and Victor Cienra, a big applause for them, please. Also, the content advisor committee, Carlos Costa from Vizões Utes, Cristina Grande from Serralves Foundation, João Garcia Miguel from Companhia, João Garcia Miguel, Mônica Guerreira from Porto City Hall, Francisco Malher from Teatro Municipal do Porto, Nunca Rinhas from São João National Theater, Paula Veranda from General Directorate of the Arts, Reit, Contemporary Dance Association, Vânia Rodrigues, Independent Cultural Manager and Thiago Bartolomeu Costa, International Advisor for the Secretary of State for the Culture. Also, the directors of all the venues where IETM Porto will take place, Bernan Dincaste from Portuguese Photography Center and Fatima Merinho from Porto University and of course, the IETM Secretariat Team, IETM Advisory Board and the IETM Advisory Committee. I am sure that you will like to discover the different venues where IETM will happen as the artistic program proposed for these days. The dance program is presented in partnership with the DDD Festival and the theater program was built with different partners in the city, giving particular attention and focus to the artists and companies from Porto. Here at Rivalry Theater, we have our day and night meeting point where you can eat, drink, work and dance all night long. On Saturday, a special night is planned in a special place, the Perla Negra, it means Black Pearl, which I'm sure you will love. And now let me present the opening keynote. Eduardo Viverge de Castro, the Brazilian anthropologist know for this attempt to decolonize talk, is the ex in this two-fold opening delivered in the format of a lecture performance directed by Sonia Sobral and performed by Fernanda Silva, Brazilian artist from PAOE, a state in the north of Brazil, and founder and director of Metaphor Theater. The second part will be a keynote by Alvaro Domingues, Portuguese writer and geographer, with a specific interest in the geography of social inequalities. While Viverge de Castro is in the text, who's involuntar de Apatia, involuntar de Faderland denounces the condition of the natives American in Brazil, approached from the indigenous presence in the Americas, Domingues leads us to central questions of the Anthropocene. Who are the excluded of today and what new or old words do they inhabit? Let's see and listen, see you soon and enjoy these days in Porto. Thank you. This is a very strong text by Viverge de Castro, called by Fernanda, and it confronts us with this problematic situation of what humans are today. In a time when, as it is said, those who speak of the Anthropocene never, the action of the humans was so profound, never so difficult to understand what a human is. A human being as a species, all the homo sapiens that live on Earth, or from a philosophical point of view, the human condition. But in the rest, understanding humanity as a whole, that is already very problematic. Thinking that the planet, the so-called blue planet, is a space ship where the humans are, and that this ship takes people inside, and that people are organized, have a command, have certain goals, that is already very difficult to understand, because the most normal thing is that what we call the world, the globalization, appears to us every day in multiple ways, with multiple cases, without us knowing very well that humans are those who are patriots, or who are matriots, who belong, who govern them, what is the polis that defines the world of humans. I was challenged to comment on this text of Viveres de Castro, and I thought that what Fernanda brought us here was a kind of double exclusion of humans, double because it is excluded from being poor, from being dominated, double also because it was removed from its identity, and one of those preferences that we, more or less, understand, which is the preference to a state, is to have a citizenship right, in this case, does not correspond to reality. And therefore, I propose you a small trip to understand how this idea of the other was built, and this way of understanding the alternative. I remembered that perhaps bringing a touch of pity, which they say belonged to one of the last boss, Incas, was a way of bringing here the theme of the other in the form of the exotic. The exotic, especially when it was refreshed and adduced by the aesthetic of the romantic, is something that is distant to us, it is something that we do not know, but we think that it is a happy utopia, that it is something that comes to our mind, as well as the geographic national documentaries, that some of them show us happy worlds, close to nature, as they say, and that this way they embrace our condition of humanity. We can move on to the next one. This well-known canteen plan, from the beginning of the 16th century, is a map that dates back to 1503, we can say that it is almost the first map of globalization. The cartoon, as you know, is a kind of world painting, and it has that magical power to say what things are when we have no idea of how they are, and then, between new worlds, as they were called in the Americas, and incognito lands, which were those medieval stories that used to say that the sea flowed below the equator, and that there were men with only one eye, with three legs, etc. Finally, that world was going to unfold, and as it was going to unfold, it was going to split. Over there, where those papayas are, you will know that Brazil, for a long time, was called in Europe the land of the papayas, because the papayas, the Araras, impressed the first Europeans, was over there that Spaniards and Portuguese divided the world. Even today, that is to say, today the world is not divided by these Spaniards and Portuguese, and today the world does not have a division only. We live in multipolar worlds, and the ways of power are inscribed in maps that do not have the clarity of this. However, this is the first map that says that the humans, among other things, are looking for the domain of the world, they are looking to capture their power. We can go on. Peruvaz de Caminha, the person who accompanied Pedro Ávarez Cabral on his journey to Brazil, to the lands of Veracruz, gave us a text, left us a text, that today we see that text as a happy text, it seems that we were still in the age of innocence, and he tells us several times that the army of Pedro Ávarez Cabral found in the lands of Veracruz happy people, well-constituted, and that they were going to us and refer to nudity four or five times in his text, as if speaking of nudity and speaking of the absence of shame that the Indians felt by going to us, this corresponded to a kind of primary innocence, a bit like the one that was praying in the sacred books of Christianity and Judaism, and would exist in the paradise before the man falling before his god. So, these first representations, the painting is a bit later, it is already defined in the 16th century, but these first representations of the people that the Europeans did not know, are happy representations and part of a doubt that is to know the light of the scholastic, the light of the thought of the church, if these humans had a soul or not. On the contrary, they, among themselves, discussed that yes, that the white people would have a soul, because the stones, the trees, the animals were also inhabited by spirits, but the question was if the white people would not be gods. And so, the question was put aside in a completely different way, some were asking if they were animals, if they had a soul and others were asking if they were gods. And this is how a story begins that becomes complicated as time goes by. Montaigne, for example, in his famous text, The Cannibals in 1580, still talks about this good salvation, as I would say, the Rousseau, many years later, and talks about an utopia of life, that, among other things, says everything you can read here, that there is no science, there is no superiority, politics, there is no servitude, there is no wealth or poverty, there is no propriety or the regime of succession or partitions, there is no vestiment, there is no agricultural activity, there is no wine, there are no words in your vocabulary for distrust, traction, dissimulation, vareza, envy, forgiveness, etc. That is, what Montaigne transmits to us, and many painters and filmmakers of the time, is a kind of a happy utopia where humanity would return to a primordial state where there would not be these separations between the human, the natural and the supernatural. Everything would be a kind of totality where those basic instincts of the humans would not enter. We can move on. However, and almost at the same time, there was a completely different image of me. A traveler, Theodore de Brie, in 1556 wrote a book and sent it to illustrate that book had a huge success in Europe and had this huge title of true description of a country of savages in the Zika Nibai, located in the New World of America, in Essen, before and after the birth of Christ, until two years ago, Hans Staden, of Hamburg, in Essen, for his own experience he knew, etc. And then, how is it almost simultaneously? At the same time that the discovery of the New World and the incognites was the discovery of paradigms and states of humanity close to the divine, in his version more ferocious, in his version more inhuman which is the cannibal. We can move on. At the same time, search for for all the Americas, for all the Africa, to evangelize and create an idea that after all the mission that the Europeans had was to take civilization, as it was said in the books of history, in Portugal, to spread faith and empire. And faith was a narrative about the beliefs of the magic thought of the existence of a god, but at the same time this narrative was also a device of normativeness so that the new peoples of many different cultures aligned by a single way of thinking which at the same time legitimized the presence and power of other humans. We can move on. In any case, it is still in 1501 I believe that a Portuguese painter Fernão Vasco, Grão Vasco Perdão paints this visitation of the magic king and it is the first time that in the history of European painting the figure of one of the magic kings appears painted as an Indian. And it is curious to think how in this game of contradictions about who was the other and to know if the other was an animal or would it be a future slave as it was black? Because in European culture black was a slave by nature it was thought to have been born inferior it was said by biblical reports that one of the children of Caim had been one of the children of Noé who had been cursed and of his stilts derived from the blacks that would serve the others for the rest of their lives. This was a report that does not put great doubts while the other indigenous people of America had a soul or not, it was the object of the heated discussion. And then this is a moment of escape in which India appears in a completely different way. A Jesuit slave who left us many writings and who was a defender of the Indian condition and of the black slaves in Brazil left us very related to the conditions of life of the colony in the 18th century but it was also telling us realistically that if the freedom was given to the slaves that would be the total destruction of Brazil. Because they would leave the farms and would not want more than the freedom of their body and would return to the forest and then it would be the total ruin. That is, despite all Father Antonio Vieira who was a critic of the colonization ended up recognizing that things had their limits and in the end the slavery could be tolerated. And as you know, the slavery was originally a terrible business a business of slaves that produced in mass what Agamben in his well-known book calls the Omo Sasser Human without any rights delivers to the discriminatory power of anyone and there is the inability to reveal themselves as citizens. We can continue. In the end, the colonialism and the economic regime that corresponds to it which is no more than a globalized capitalism and which organizes in that engraving the tea the coffee the sugar but also the mining exploration all that all that brilliant industry makes and characterizes the colonial economy and ends up leaving a terrible mark on that side of the planet that we call today the Great South. The ferret of slavery the landing the land for great gentlemen or for the crown and the fact is to organize an economy in which North-South relations are unbalanced. We can continue. At the same time, they told us that it was not about that that the developed countries had the duty of civilizing the other which was the propaganda the Tarzan films the books of the obligatory school the notes had a strong iconography trying to convince us that the white teaches the black to cultivate the land that the high values of the country and the United will protect the most fragile side we know that nothing of that happened. We can. Levis told us that everyone will know here in the room with all the authority that characterizes was one of the people who denounced the situation of endemic poverty lived in South America but not only writing a book which is the Trist Tropics and another called the thought of salvation The thought of salvation is a book that I personally think is incredible because at this time and we are in the 1970s and it was not necessary to explain to the civilized states that the thought of salvation was not the thought of salvation the thought of salvation is a way of thinking of the technical of the scientist and it is very close to the thought of the bricklayer of the person who, for example, a challenge begins to imagine how that solution will be and then comes inventing that solution step by step and not as an engineer thinking about the whole process designing, writing, calculating and then in the end building. It is also a denunciation in the planet that there are different cultures after long periods of colonization that created the colonized south especially after post-war is the time of the movements of liberation and the decolonization of these countries and for a while there were clear days and a luminous thought that people would have the right to self-determination and that would inaugurate an era of a more balanced and fair planet at least that is what was thought of after all, what happened was not well that here there are times being me in Angola and questioning what is happening exactly in this land was one of the most late African independence as you know in 1975 and after one or two years of almost free state there is a terrible civil war that lasts 30 years and gives an incredible murder and then comes a regime similar to many other regimes of African continent that is not very well understood what it is of the republic etc and this person said you don't notice anything that you come from Europe we saw directly of the utopian socialism for tribal capitalism that is, looking at this work of a well-known South African artist many of these countries like South America had sympathisers regimes of the Soviet Union and values of the common and justice that the state would defend with these symbols the stars, the serials, etc and now in a globalized world you don't notice very well that regimes are these that self-determination is this and how the globalization is organized in these countries on the contrary, it seems that politics was absorbed by interests whether they were agricultural products in mass whether it was mineral exploration whether it was cheap labor and the rest, what are these countries as patres, it is very difficult to understand the very globalization can appear in this unusual way in Luanda a trade of beira de estrada that says it sells candy and has 50% promotions and you can pay in a month to buy a candy that is a very well-known tree with Africa and a great claim written in Chinese this in my opinion is one of those images that metaphorically tells us in a clear way what is the world today who we are here we are in a certain place who is here who has in hand our destiny we heard about the phenomenon of illegal land appropriation land grabbing we know that land grabbing goes from the mass production of soy to the production of cattle to the production of cereals of corn whatever and that these negotiations are led by big companies that have no heritage because capitalism has no heritage and then considering the negotiations that are done with local or national or regional governments the legitimate owners of these lands are expulsors or send them sympathically with programs that the European Bank of Investment supports in the end they are thousands of hectares that every day pass to multinational companies agriculture and that somehow comes to an end to our dish in the form of wheat flakes of a huge series of products that we do not know where they are produced at the same time when the owner said that about 8 years ago that more than half of the global population lived in cities are not the cities that we imagine for example when we imagine the port this mass of humans that urbanized quickly corresponds to this and other images of the urbanization of poverty it was an urbanization that was done very quickly because there was no means of subsistence in the rural world and because urbanization was a promise of employment and emancipation but strangely this urbanization has been made without economic growth and this urbanization without economic growth makes it grow on that side of urbanization that in India are the slums in Brazil are the favelas in Mexico are the barriades in Angola is the mosaic and out there and this is the urban condition that we have to know the idea of ​​the city as something that is a kind of civilizational and well-being that everyone in the world would have arrived one day armed conflicts are also unfortunately another news that every day and many times it is not even talked about so if there are more different explanations there are economic interests these are always ethnic issues because when at the conference in Berlin in the late 19th century the colonies were divided by countries the border was made and many ethnic groups who had their territories and recognized them in a certain way did not come back in these borders if by chance there is a jazzy of a mine or whatever there is oil immediately these ethnic issues often are accelerated are activated so that the conflict is resolved in favor of a certain group that will be the lord and that will be and that will be taken from these riches then we watch masses of millions that unfold a little fleeing of these conflicts some especially serious some especially violent that give rise to concentration camps that have already become fixed camps created a kind of state of exception in which the refugee camp stops being a provisional situation while it is not resolved the problem that touches these peoples however, there are refugee camps with 30, 40 and 50 years where there are generations that are no longer there and that no longer know another reality without being the reality of the camp one of the main problems of the UN which at the moment is also seen as a financial crisis to finance it this is our world we are here in a comfortable way but we know that there are some out there things are going this way it is a constant fight for life for survival someone who is constantly sending us to stop for people to pass with a well as as basic as water but the day to day in many of the great megalopolis of these survival exercises and many times the images are like this as walls we are changing and static for the complicated contradictory world that appears in front of us and that we do not understand very well how it is resolved because this is the big question for many movements that are many struggles that sometimes do not pass Facebook and other social networks there is an idea generalized that there is no government in this world there is no government for these inequalities and therefore each one is for themselves and those possible solutions we can move forward and those possible solutions that often appear conflict the end are very provisional solutions and very precarious because the day to follow or the week to follow the question is already another and the recomposition of certain countries in front of that question will also be another or simply the theme that I forgot because they both appeared five or six new themes there is this kind of excess of information things go much faster than the time we have to understand and therefore what I want to say is that globalization the speed it goes and the speed it produces injustice is not in any way accompanied by political structures that give body to this globalization and what they say at the end of the day how it is generated sometimes it is even shocking that in times of great fear because of the carbon dioxide or the climate change it seems that there is more energy to fight against that than to end poverty and inequality for the people who the question and who take care of cultural and artistic production what I want is that these themes never disappear of our work that art and culture are forms of questioning forms of giving to see forms of not letting to sleep the consciences and we know that the world is like this it is not to say my fault, my fault and to be anachronistic thinking that we are the culprits of the colonizers of 400 years ago it is not what I want to say we are aware of what the world is the story that tells us about what can possibly be this world