Lisbon, Alkântara Library
June 14, 6:30 pm
Moderation: Maria Vlachou
Free entry

Porto, TeCA – Carlos Alberto Theater
June 20, 6:30 pm
Moderation: Denise Pollini
On the occasion of Access Culture Week 2022
Free entry

Culture critic Marta Porto will be once again in Portugal in June. We take the opportunity to discuss her book Imagination: reinventing culture.

“The generative principle of all creation and all destruction is imagination. […] Capsules of imagination should be encouraged in all actions of art, in the sciences, in schools, in temples, wherever there is a dimension that deals with human subjectivity.” In the 12 essays gathered in this book, Marta Porto proposes the arts and cultural policies – which derive from the raw material that is imagination – as the basis for a new vision of democracy, more inclusive, more comprehensive and consequently more human.

About the author

Culture critic, journalist, intellectual, Marta Porto has participated in the main international arenas of debates on arts, culture and cultural policies for the last 25 years. With an outstanding work in the areas of culture and development, social imagination and democracy, she has been leading or collaborating with the United Nations, government and social foundation programmes, in projects for the democratisation of arts and culture, cultural communication and social engagement. She was the youngest coordinator of one of UNESCO’s offices in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro/1999-2003), member of the Committee that prepared Agenda 21 for Culture in Cities (Barcelona, ​​2004) and in 2011 she held the position of Secretary of Citizenship and Diversity at the Ministry of Culture. In 2004, she co-founded the first communication company for causes in the country, XBrasil. She was awarded the Prix Mobius de Multimídia Cultural (Unesco, Ministries of Culture and Science and Technology of France, 1997), the Beija-Flor Prize (Rio, 2002) and the Honorable Mention of Human Rights of the State of Rio de Janeiro (2001).  She is an Ashoka Fellow since 2010. Currently, she maintains a civic communication studio, with a interdisciplinary team,  that acts as a thinktank specialised in this segment and in creating spaces and cultural environments associating art and culture with knowledge, education and communication policies, MP_Consultoria (www.martaporto.com.br) . She is a columnist for Revista Exame, a professor at the Cultural and Social Studies Program at ABGC and at the Research and Training Center at SescSP, where she has maintained a Laboratory for the Management of Cultural Spaces for seven years.