The climate and environmental crisis has led to an unprecedented loss of biodiversity. This loss of biodiversity is accompanied by a loss of cultural diversity, including languages threatened by extinction due to technological advancements or conceptual worlds being liquidated due to political agendas.

In an increasingly virtualised world, endangered conceptual worlds may serve as contexts for the development of novel narrative strategies. These strategies involve exposing differences, modulating distances, and generating productive forms of disenchantment. Instead of fostering identification, empathy, and compassion, this challenge entails making the familiar unfamiliar and promoting doubt rather than suspending disbelief.

Addressing the threats to cultural diversity relies on and stimulates creative resilience. As endangered conceptual worlds face the rapid erosion of unique traditions, knowledges, languages and artistic expressions, the need for innovative approaches to preserving cultural diversity becomes obvious.

Rather than looking at each sub-sector in isolation, thereby exacerbating the fragmentation of the sector, this challenge requires an understanding of the CCI as a whole, as a creative ecosystem in which innovation in one sector can affect another. This allows for the recognition of multiple forms of value.

This challenge encourages creative confidence and enhances cultural competence to develop adaptive strategies that not only preserve cultural heritage, but also enliven it with contemporary forms of expression. In this way, the very act of confronting cultural loss becomes a catalyst for cultural innovation and creative resilience.

Specific challenges for PACESETTERS main target groups:

  1. For artists and creatives: Gaining the ability to create affect through techniques that revalue cultural heritage and its precarious states in a virtualising world
  2. For research: Analysing the desire for creating multiple forms of value, and in doing so, increasing creative resilience that supports minoritised languages and endangered conceptual worlds
  3. For policymakers: Leveraging peculiar forms of agency and resilience that result from the ability to adapt to change
  4. For finance and investment: Supporting models of creativity with specific focus on creative subsistence.

Map of Challenges