To mark its 20th anniversary, Culture Resource is launching the open call “Reclaiming Our Commons: A Proposal for Cultural Collaboration Across the Arab Region,” which was formulated in partnership with A.M Qattan Foundation and has been developed by a number of fellow and partner organizations, including Ettijahat – Independent Culture, Aflamuna, and L’art Rue, which constitute a nucleus contributing to project funding and programming.
“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.
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.
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.
The deadline for applications is 12 April 2024 at 16:00 Beirut time.
For more information about this project, the approach of “commons”, and the eligibility criteria and application guidelines, please visit this page.
