Open Call Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration across the Arab Region

“Reclaiming Our Commons” is a call to contribute to building a participatory creative process addressed to initiatives, cooperatives, independent cultural and artistic organizations, as well as artists and cultural actors. It seeks to support artistic and cultural projects across diverse artistic and interdisciplinary domains, provided they adopt cooperative, participatory, and/or commons-based approaches, whether at the project development level, project ownership, project interpretations and outputs, or project revenues.

The project encourages the use of documentation as a main practice throughout the implementation of the projects. This is to ensure engagement with a broader audience and contribution to collective learning by adopting various mediums such as texts, videos, podcasts, radio, comics, or any other mediums. The project also necessitates adherence to cultural and artistic work ethics and the adoption of a fair economic model that ensures the rights of authors and workers.

Funding Information

• Culture Resource and the project partners will provide grants ranging from €8,000 to €30,000 to fund approximately 12 projects (the funding will be determined based on each project’s needs). The projects will be implemented and showcased in various cities across the Arab region in 2024 and 2025. Subsequently, specific projects will be selected to participate in central events in Beirut and Ramallah, the details of which will be determined later.

Why Reclaim Our Commons?

• The project suggests the commons/publicness as a concept, approach, practice, and value that does not necessarily provide immediate solutions. Instead, it establishes creative pathways for inclusive cultural work and collective social change. Through its participatory process, the project aims to generate new approaches that inspire individuals and organizations within the cultural sector to explore sustainable ways forward. It also seeks to contribute to producing a discourse and/or practices that advocate for reclaiming communal space, memory, and imagination by transforming the private or official into participatory, collective, and public.
• The project is built upon the premise that non-consumerist cultural production has succeeded in critiquing consumerism and mainstream culture. However, it failed to achieve sustainability. Despite several organizations in the sector ensuring institutional independence from donors, non-consumerist cultural production still operates within marginal economies, rendering it unviable, with infrastructure that is either limited or fragile. Additionally, it clashes with several intellectual currents that oppose pluralism, and functions within an extremely violent colonial reality. Therefore, the project suggests exploring communal cultural practices as a potential avenue for addressing these challenges.

Eligibility Criteria

• Individuals
  • Artists from diverse artistic disciplines and independent cultural actors, provided they are from the Arab region (regardless of ethnicity and citizenship status), whether they are living inside or outside the Arab region.
• Groups
  • Independent non-governmental initiatives, cooperatives, and artistic and cultural organizations in the Arab region or abroad, whose work serves artistic and cultural production in Arabic.
• Recipients of any other grant from Culture Resource’s programs may still apply to this project.

For more information, visit Culture Resource.