If we had to summarise the seminar that we held last week in our offices to launch The Point of Culture – Brazil turned upside down, we could borrow Célio Turino’s formula: PC=(AxP)^N. This seemingly inextricable mathematical expression unfolds to reveal the meaning of the celebrated Pontos de Cultura, a concept that articulates an innovative approach to cultural policy championed by Brazil , authored by Turino and already being ‘translated’ and implemented in other countries.

The ponto (point) is at the heart of a paradigmatic change in terms of how the State understands culture and produces cultural policy. The shift, crystallised in the Cultura Viva programme, gives new substance to the concept of ‘the arts’ itself, rejecting the monopoly of the often elitist cultural mainstream to embrace the abundance and richness of existing forms of artistic expression. This recognition of the value of plurality creates an enabling context to reformulate the way the State engages with artists and communities. In the words of Turino, the State no longer claims to ‘bring culture to the people’ but rather to give voice and empower popular culture.

To achieve this, funding streams cease to be the Trojan horse of a pre-packaged cultural agenda and become means for cultural groups to support their practice based on their own requirements and perspective. This approach reveals the first elements of the equation that we presented earlier: the point of culture (PC) involves encouraging social autonomy (A). Indeed, this scheme actively seeks to break down the [vertical] relations of dependency or welfare that have characterised State support and substitute them with a model of [horizontal] power sharing between the State and the people.

Understood through this prism, autonomy acquires an active connotation, a purpose. State support under this scheme goes beyond the transactional and seeks to ‘de-silence’ community voices, to give them the means to access the public sphere, to be salient, to assume protagonism (P). This empowering interplay of autonomy and protagonism favours the emergence of a new idea of citizenship, which Turino describes as ‘more substantive’. In other words, the individual is considered a citizen not only because of his/her formal membership to the nation, but as a consequence of his/her active participation in public life and through the respect of his/her political, social and, in particular, cultural rights.

The notion of participation is at the heart of the Point of Culture programme and it underpins the importance given to networks (N). While we might be used to perceiving points as static and isolated, the programme sees them as the elements of a journey and the building blocks of an interconnected teia (web) within which dialogue and exchanges reinvigorate cultural expression and foster the emergence of links of solidarity between the nodes. In this way, the programme has devised a virtuous articulation of identity and otherness, not only restructuring the relation of citizens with the state, but also redefining interaction within civil society.

While still in its infancy, the learning from this programme not only contributes to reaffirming our conviction on the transformative power of the arts, but it also encourages us to rethink the place of culture in our society and explore novel ways of supporting artistic expression.