On Mobilisation. Towards Multivocal Collaborative Futures

NEW BEGINNINGS

We are happy to share with you that On Mobilisation continues!

The first phase of the project, that ended in 2025, was shaped through bottom-up collaboration between wpZimmer (BE), Baltic Art Center (SE), Studio ALTA (CZ) and Lavanderia a Vapore (IT). Rooted in international solidarity and attentive to local specificities, it brought together artists, communities and cultural workers committed to social justice, equality and radical forms of civic participation. Together with artists Kalle Brolin, Elisabetta Consonni, Daniele Ninarello, Ahilan Ratnamohan, Marika Smreková, and Danae Theodoridou, the project explored how artistic research and practice can become spaces for listening, organising, imagining and mobilising otherwise.

New relationships, questions, practices and ways of working together have been growing across different local contexts since then, bringing us to the next chapter — On Mobilisation. Towards Multivocal Collaborative Futures (2026-2029) co-funded by the European Union. The project is facilitated by expanded circle of partner organisations based in Europe: Lavanderia a Vapore in Collegno (IT), Baltic Art Center in Visby (SE), Out of Sight in Antwerp (BE), Divadlo X10 in Prague (CZ) and BLOK — Local Base for Culture Refreshment in Zagreb (HR).

At the centre is a simple but demanding question: what conditions are needed for people to feel agency, to enter into collective authorship, and to imagine shared futures? The project approaches artistic practice as a way of engaging with social and political realities, with care, attention and responsibility.

While we are working on our new website, we invite you to revisit On Mobilisation. Micro- and transnational communities mobilisation through artistic practice and spend time with the traces of the project and download publications developed between 2023 and 2025.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, the world has witnessed tectonic geopolitical shifts marked by escalating conflicts, ongoing genocide against Palestinians, increasing authoritarianism, and growing social and economic inequalities. These developments have led to the dehumanisation and marginalisation of entire communities, deepening class divides, and a rise in poverty and social exclusion. At the same time, we are also witnessing the emergence of powerful grassroots movements that resist these hegemonic forces: united students, teachers, dock workers, public employees, farmers,…asserting collective and transnational forms of solidarity and action.

On a local level, public funding priorities are shifting in ways that undermine European democratic values. Budgets are being increasingly redirected towards militarisation and security, often at the expense of culture, education, and support for minority and marginalised communities. This reallocation of resources represents not only a form of structural censorship but also a gradual erosion of civic space and critical discourse.

Within this context, the cultural sector is particularly vulnerable. The consolidation of power, reduced transparency in decision-making, and shrinking public support for culture are reshaping the conditions of cultural labour. Artists and cultural workers face growing precarity, limited access to resources, and heightened psychological strain.

As a transnational collective in formation, we root our practices in the principles and legacies of direct democracy, peer-to-peer education, self-management, and horizontal organisation. These principles underpin every aspect of the project: from artistic research, creation and curation, to governance, communication, participation, and dissemination.

This new cycle creates conditions for collective learning, co-creation and experimentation. It works with culture as a space where democratic relations can be rehearsed, where communities can gather around difficult questions, and where artistic practice can contribute to more just, caring and sustainable ways of living and working together.

We are organised through five locally rooted Study Circles in Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Czech Republic and Croatia, bringing together people with different experiences and forms of knowledge. Each Study Circle focuses on one of the five thematic pillars: visual literacy, new forms of social realism, socially engaged approaches to heritage, critical imagination, and the redefinition of success in the cultural field, responding to urgencies of the present. These local processes will be connected through Gathering Points, transnational residencies and meetings where different voices, languages, practices and unresolved questions can meet.

Join us in this journey!

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On Mobilisation. Towards Multivocal Collaborative Futures is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.