RESHAPE: An Experiment in Collaborative Change-making

Our societies are facing multiple pressures. Extreme polarisation, rising intolerance and growing nationalism seem to have invaded the political space. The climate catastrophe is looming over us, without agreement on how to prevent it, or even postpone it. Freedom of expression is under threat by authoritarian governments; political opinions and choices are being manipulated on a scale never seen before. Extreme commodification is invading even the most intimate aspects of our lives.

Transnational / postnational artistic practices

Changing the Game: The RESHAPE Transition

This text is a first attempt to join the dots between the proposals, to draft the initial contours of a framework for understanding them. To understand the proposals, it can be useful to first have a brief look at the origins and the promise of RESHAPE, and how the project itself was redesigned and reshaped during an intensive process within the RESHAPE community. Secondly, we begin a reflection on how these proposals might contribute to responding to the current needs within the arts field. In very different ways, these proposals respond to increasing pressures concerning how the arts are organized, governed, and supported (or not).