The Cooperative Action warned this Monday of “unbearable delays” in the announcement of results and contracting in “all the competitions” of the support programs of the General Directorate of the Arts (DGArtes).
This year, ‘ALL’ the tenders suffered unbearable delays in the communication of results and the respective contracting. At this time, the requests for the Association Support Program – Art and Active Aging, for projects that should have started their execution as of April 1, 2022, are still unanswered,” said Ação Cooperativista, in a statement. this week broadcast on Monday.
The general director of the Arts, Américo Rodrigues, in statements to the Lusa agency, on the sidelines of the Ignição Oeiras Gerardo meeting, assumed that there are delays, but highlighted “the enormous effort on the part of the DGArtes, with the human resources it has, to answer all quizzes.
Emphasizing that he did not have access to the statement from the Ação Cooperativista, Américo Rodrigues assumed that the the organism would like to “be faster”something that does not always happen, taking into account that “DGArtes has diversified its financing to artists”.
There are some delays, but many more contests and many more artists and entities supported. The number of applications and competitions is increasing, expanding the possibilities of financing, it is understandable that some are delayed”, he said, explaining that, “in most cases, these delays derive from the overload of work and effort of analysis of the proposals ”.
According to Américo Rodrigues, “if anything remains a post-pandemic record in terms of competitions, it is that there was a significant increase in applications, in some cases triple what was expected.”
Regarding the results of the Collaboration Support Program — Art and Active Aging, the general director of the Arts has indicated that the provisional results will be known “within a few days”, justifying this delay with the fact that these agreements ” derive from the combination of efforts between two entities”, in this case DGArtes and Santa Casa da Misericordia.
“The results depend on the dynamics of the jury, on their availability for meetings,” he said.
On the start of the execution period of the projects supported in this tender, Américo Rodrigues stressed that “DGArtes always reviews or can review the execution deadlines”, and “has accepted all proposals for changing deadlines”.
“What we want is for the projects to be carried out and they have all been carried out,” he said.
Ação Cooperativista, an informal group created last year in the context of a pandemic, defends in the statement that, “in order to guarantee compliance with the rules of the DGARTES contests, the new Statute of Professionals in the Area of Culture and the contract obligations derived from it, it is imperative and exemplary that the DGARTES fulfill its obligations, in particular with regard to the notification of results, the signing of the contract and the payment of the tranches”.
“Any delay during this process – as it continues to occur in a serious way – unequivocally constitutes an imminent scenario of contractual breach by the entity towards the employee, also compromising the execution of the contracted plan of activities”, says Ação Cooperativista, highlighting that, “as of this year, this scenario is more likely due to the expected increase in the number of employment contracts with the entry into force of the new Statute”.
According to the Ação Cooperativista, in order to “avoid the imminent breach of the artistic structures towards the people with whom they work, caused by a delay by DGArtes”, many of them ended up in debt.
In recent years there have been several alerts, by associations and the union of cultural workers, due to delays in the DGArtes contests.
The six tenders of the DGArtes Sustained Support Program, in the biennial (2023-2024) and four-year (2023-2026) modalities, with a global amount of around 81.3 million euros, were opened on May 13, Applications closed on July 5.
Biennial competitions have a total budget of €20.5 million and quadrennial competitions have a total budget of €60.8 million.
The seven competitions of the Project Support Program have different opening dates: the limited competition for the selection of the Official Portuguese Representation at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 is scheduled to open in August, the Complementary Support for Creative Europe is expected to open in September, and the rest in October.
In addition to the Sustained Support and Project Support programs, the 2022 Annual Declaration also provides for the opening, “at the end of the year, of the Support Program for Collaboration in the Arts and Territorial Cohesion, with a global financial allocation of one million of euros”.
In the statement released this Monday, Ação Cooperativista also warns about the existence of “recurring delays in payments” by other institutions, “supported by the DGArtes, by the central and/or local power.”
“It is common for these institutions to take on the co-production, commissioning or purchase of the shows, which makes it impossible for the artistic structures to comply with the obligations indicated in the employment contracts,” he reports.
For this reason, the Cooperative Action demands “that all public entities be exemplary in complying with payment deadlines, in order to guarantee that the rules of the Statute are applied”, defending that “more effective control will reinforce this conduct”.
“The State cannot demand that artists and independent structures comply with what it does not comply with,” he says.
Source: Observadora
