The COLERE manifesto
We are born of nature, but never born complete.
We inherit a body, a language, memories and a moment in history, and through life with others we keep learning the world and remaking ourselves. This is where culture happens: a second nature we grow together.
Today, technology is changing how we live faster than ever. Many expect the next twenty years to be anything but calm.
In times like these, culture rarely disappears. It narrows. One logic of efficiency, reach and the market slowly crowds out the others, and many ways of living are pressed into one. Culture is still there; it has simply stopped moving.
Yet culture was always plural: many lives, many searches, many ideas of meaning and beauty, passing between people, colliding, feeding one another.
For it to move, someone has to cross a border, out of their own field, their own language, their own familiar habitat, and knock on someone else’s door. That ability lives in all of us. It may be the most basic one we have.
We believe culture never grows alone. It needs places to meet, languages in which we can understand each other, and room for difference to stay different. Common means that our limited views can connect.
Machines can do much for us. They cannot take part for us.
So we work at the borders. We listen to what is there, bring different people and organisations together, design partnerships worth committing to, and lay common ground for culture, so that it moves from a past we preserve, to a present we share, to a future that serves us all.
COLERE
Cultivating Culture in Common.
Cultivating
A gardener does not command growth, but reads the seed, knows the soil, and prepares the conditions.
Culture
Culture is both seed and soil. It stays alive for as long as people keep using it, telling it, arguing over it and remaking it.
in Common
Common does not mean the same. It is shared ground where different people can meet, negotiate, and make something together.