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In Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

Everything moves, or does it? Empires and im:mobility

claire louise blaser
  In 1937, British India issued a series of postage stamps featuring the newly crowned King George VI. In them, the monarch shares the frame with an unlikely cast: a postman on foot, an ox cart, a horse-drawn carriage, a camel, a train, a steamer, a motorcar and an airplane (fig. 1). As David Arnold (Warwick) noted in his keynote for the workshop Empire and (im-)mobility in South and Southeast Asia, 19th and 20th centuries, this series depicts an ‘imperial ordering of mobilities’ in miniature: a visual narrative of progress from human- to animal- to machine-powered mobility that also reminds us, however, that these varied modes of transportation and communication were all connected.

Fig. 1: British India postage stamps, King George VI Transport Series, 1937. (Public domain)

Held in New Delhi on 6–7 February 2026 and co-organised by Siddharth Pandey (Munich/New Delhi) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Munich/Zurich), both fellows at gd:c, the workshop invited participants to consider how mobility and immobility have been historically shaped, enabled and enforced in relation to one another. Over two days, scholars traced the movement of bicycles, planes, machines, seamen, writers and criminals across borderlands, oceans and empires. Relating the (post)colonial contexts of South and Southeast Asia to the British and Dutch Empires, the event also sought to open transimperial perspectives on the history of im:mobility. As Arnold observed in his keynote, historians of these regions have long studied movement through migration, trade, epidemics and the circulation of ideas. The workshop’s contribution therefore lay less in demonstrating that movement has a history than in exploring the analytical utility of im:mobility for historians in terms of what it can reveal about how empires were governed and infrastructures built, how people imagined space, and how bodies experienced the world.

Fig. 2: The organisers Siddharth Pandey (left) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Photo: Siddharth Pandey)

 

Fig. 3: Siddharth Pandey (left) and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Photo: Abhimanyu Pandey).

Power: regimes of im:mobility

A central theme that emerged throughout was that im:mobility makes power visible. Several contributions tackled questions like who gets to move, who gets stopped, why and how; they focused on regulation and governance, revealing colonial rule as a project that relied on controlling motion. Yet, as several papers showed, that control was always incomplete. Colonial and postcolonial regimes alike had to contend with the fact that their visions of absolute regulation of their constituents’ im:mobility were often at odds with the practicalities of implementation. Michaela Dimmers (New Delhi) demonstrated this tension in her account of British Indian prisons. Convicts, she showed, were simultaneously highly mobile through no will of their own and intensely immobile through their confinement. The penal regime aspired to total control, but the everyday realities of prison show that im:mobility was constantly negotiated and compromised in practice. Abhimanyu Pandey’s (Ahmedabad) paper focused on how im:mobility is tied up with the notion of remoteness, viewing the latter as a governmental category. In Spiti, on the Indo-Tibetan border, colonial and postcolonial regimes alternately restricted and expanded access through mobility infrastructures in the interest of state sovereignty. Focusing on a different border, Vaibhav Bhardwaj (Delhi) traced how criminal mobility became a test case for fragile state sovereignty after the partition of British India. The movement of criminals between India and Pakistan challenged newly drawn borders, turning criminal mobility into a territorial dispute and a performance of sovereignty. Similarly invoking the instability and malleability of mobility regimes after partition, Naina Manjrekar (Bombay) showed how the recruitment and movement of seamen between India and Pakistan can be read as a clash between established colonial and newly forming postcolonial regimes of im:mobility. Shivangi Jaiswal (Venice) also reflected on links between labour and mobility through a case study of Indian workers who were sent to wartime Britain for technical training in the 1940s. Her contribution demonstrated how even a colonial-era regime that explicitly sought to enable both physical and social mobility was tightly controlled and socially stratified.

Knowledge: techno-mobility, infrastructures and im:mobile ideas

A second cross-cutting theme at the workshop concerned the relationship between mobility and knowledge. In the 19th and 20th centuries, mobility and its meanings were bound to new technologies that transformed how people moved in space. Several papers explored the emergence of this modern ‘techno-mobility’: im:mobility mediated by machines, infrastructures and technical expertise. Philipp Krauer (Zurich) told the story of the ‘Java bogie’, a locomotive component that travelled from Switzerland to the Dutch East Indies and eventually to colonial India. This case study unsettles narratives of direct technological diffusion from colonial metropoles to their peripheries by including lateral transcolonial conncections and European countries without colonial possessions. Andreas Greiner (Washington, DC) traced how interwar imperial aviation forced a renegotiation of airspace sovereignty. Here, inter-imperial technological rivalry ran up against the practicalities of planning intercontinental aerial routes, forcing empires such as the Dutch, British and French into ‘involuntary interdependence’, each reliant on access to the colonial skies of others. Oishi Dhar (Mānoa) zoomed in on Bengal, where over the 19th and early 20th centuries, Indian entrepreneurs adapted steam navigation technologies and ‘vernacularized’ them, transforming the steamship into a tool of swadeshi economic self-reliance and shipping ideas of anti-colonial assertion to new shores. Arnab Dutta (Groningen) examined the Greater India Society, whose intellectuals responded to imperial restrictions on Asian mobility by imagining alternative international migration regimes; the resulting visions of, for example, an ‘Asiatic Lebensraum’ reframed im:mobility in the anti-liberal logics of biologised civilisational units and population ecology. Teuku Reza Fadeli (Jakarta) and Harald Fischer-Tiné's papers both focused on an everyday technology of mobility, the bicycle, and considered how this technology was rendered governable in colonial Indonesia and India, respectively, by restricting and policing its use. At the same time, both contributions also showed how those restrictions, which in Fischer-Tiné’s framing constituted a form of ‘mobility inequality’, gradually eroded, leading to appropriations of cycling that challenged imperial and class hierarchies.

Fig. 4: gd:c goes mobile, discussing im:mobility 6000 km from headquarters (Photo: IIC Dehli).

Experience: embodied, imagined and symbolic im:mobilities

Throughout the workshop, participants repeatedly discussed who moved, how that movement (or its absence) felt and what symbolic value it carried. Several papers attended to mobility as a bodily experience, or how walking, cycling and even standing still leaves traces in muscle and memory. Fadeli and Fischer-Tiné also focused on such aspects in their papers. In urban colonial Indonesia, for example, police manuals prescribed posture and speed for cyclists: colonial governance there was enforced by regulating the behaviour of bodies in motion. In colonial India, European observers questioned whether ‘oriental’ bodies could master the ‘steel horse’. Both contributions made clear that im:mobility was not only a question of technology and governance, but also fundamentally of cultural and social symbolism. Siddharth Pandey explored this symbolism of movement, and how it could transform over time by shining light on a unique mode of mobility: ‘malling’, as residents of Shimla describe the act of walking on the town’s Mall Road. He explained how an activity that, in the colonial era, was a symbol of racial and social segregation, could become a more democratised leisurely practice in the postcolonial period, though it continued to be seen as a performance of social and political status. Mihir Jha (Delhi) showed how railway connectivity transformed the imagination of Chhotanagpur in colonial East India. New mobility infrastructure, he argued, brought upper-class travellers from Calcutta to the region, which opened a new way of reading the landscape — one that romanticised its pastoral and picturesque character, all while obscuring the industrialisation that made it accessible. Gregory Goulding (Philadelphia) traced mobility's symbolic life through the travelogues of Rahul Sankrityayan. The writer once styled himself a free-spirited wanderer challenging imperial restrictions on movement but later deployed the tropes of travel writing to incorporate the Himalayan region of Kinnaur into the imagined space of the new nation.

What else can im:mobility do for historians?

This workshop demonstrated that the mobilities paradigm, while certainly not novel, remains what Arnold called a ‘productive provocation’ for historians of South and Southeast Asia. Bringing together these diverse papers reinforced the value of thinking about the interconnections between different forms of im:mobility, as opposed to considering each mode or machine as an isolated case study. This perspective recentres marginalised aspects of mobility history. Arnold’s call to attend to animal mobility was a particularly salient example, laying out a convincing case for a multispecies history of im:mobility. Arnold also pointed to a central methodological challenge many papers grappled with implicitly: it is difficult for historians to capture the experience of im:mobility, as they mostly encounter it through mediated forms, like photographs, travelogues or stamps, each of which carries its own conventions and agendas. Several presenters illustrated their papers with striking photographs, making evident that visual technologies have long shaped how mobility is imagined and valued. Such images did not merely document im:mobility, but actively shaped its meanings, infusing it with symbolic values like modernity, authenticity and social status. The discussions also highlighted questions for future research. Participants pointed to the need to explore the relationship between mobility and immobility more explicitly and to attend to im:mobility’s historical stratification in terms of how journeys repeat or reinvent themselves with reference to previously charted paths. Finally, one form of im:mobility remained curiously underexplored: social im:mobility. In the concluding discussion, the concept of ‘motility’ – the potential for movement as a type of social capital – was suggested as a helpful approach to consider how the (in)ability to move shaped hierarchy, aspiration and identity in colonial and postcolonial societies.   Continue Reading
12 May 2026
In Voices Blog

gdc voices part iii: research. in. action. 

[Editor’s note: this post continues the series of interviews with our postdocs. For previous entries, see here and here.]

What collaborations, events and publications in the past, present or future show how the three research focuses are driving research at gd:c and beyond?

AG: If you want to see the three focusses in motion, the gd:c bridging conference 2025 is the obvious starting point. Bridging the initial era of gd:c (2021-2025) with the second (2025-2029), the bridging conference brought together the team, the directors, the advisory board as well as current and former fellows. This shows where cultural infrastructures stop being scenery and become methods of inquiry: the venues, platforms, institutions and networks that sustain cultural production while subtly shaping who is granted access, visibility and voice. SQ: And at the bridging conference, time became impossible to ignore. The panel on temporalities made that very clear. Elizabeth DeLoughrey took us into deep time and the deep sea. Siddharth Pandey followed movement, memory and transformation in Shimla in the Indian Himalayas. Ulinka Rublack unpacked the layered temporalities embedded in the global ecologies of early modern dress commodities. Different archives and different scales with a shared insight: globalisation is not only about space. It is also about pace, delay, repetition and uneven timing.

The temporalities panel at the gd:c bridging conference (left to right: Siddarth Pandey, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Ulinka Rublack, Susanne Quitmann; photo: gd:c)

CF: That again is where laboratories come in. The lab is not just a room with equipment; it is a way of making worlds comparable (and potentially improveable). Laboratories extract, isolate and translate environments into models and data. That makes connections travel. But it can also sever abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them. In that sense, labs connect infrastructures and temporalities: they organise access and authority, and they structure time through protocols, calibration, waiting and projection. SQ: Precisely such connections are why the gd:c summer school matters. Out of our diverse research environment, this particular format is where early career researchers and practitioners workshop methods together. It is one of gd:c’s most direct ways of building a shared language across disciplines and engaging with works in progress. AG: The 2024 summer school, Cultural infrastructure(s) – dis:connective perspectives, made that tangible. Organised by Christopher Balme, Nikolai Brandes, Hanni Geiger, Nic Leonhardt and Tom Menger, it brought grad students, postgrads and creative practitioners together in a week of lectures, master classes and hands-on formats, plus excursions that connect theory to real sites and their politics. Shannon Jackson’s lecture, Delivery systems: ecological infrastructures across the arts, set the tone. Infrastructures are the delivery systems for culture, power and possibility. Master classes by Eve Olney, Ursula Ströbele and Shannon Jackson deepened the conversation, while Dasha Sotnikova’s zine-making workshop translated analysis into practice. Excursions to Munich’s Architecture Museum and the Gasteig HP8 cultural complex grounded the discussion in the city’s institutional landscapes.

2024 summer school Cultural infrastructure(s) – dis:connective perspectives (Photos: gd:c)

CF: Looking ahead, the 2026 summer school, Worlds in the lab: experimental sites of dis:connectivity, continues that momentum by focussing on laboratories as built, protocol-driven environments. They are spaces that stage rehearsals, isolate variables and project futures. They promise preparedness and resilience, but they also raise hard questions about uneven labour, risk and exposure. Who gets included in the future worlds and scenarios that are being rehearsed, and who bears their costs? The programme foregrounds experimental pedagogical formats ranging from conceptual studios and hands-on exercises to field excursions in order to explore the lab itself as a method participants can actively stress test.

Worlds in the lab: experimental sites of dis:connectivity. gd:c summer school 2026.

SQ: And the 2027 summer school deals explicitly with temporalities. We want early career researchers to help shape the gd:c research focus on temporal dis:connectivity by tracing its conceptual and material tensions across fields and by co-developing a shared analytical framework for bringing diverse disciplinary projects into dialogue.  AG: Beyond recurring formats, the focusses also generate projects and publications. Sometimes the most immediate case is the institute itself. I am currently researching the chain of ownership of the building that houses gd:c, which was a house of haute couture until 1963. Its transformation into a research institute shows how cultural infrastructure is continuously reinterpreted and reactivated. The building is not a neutral container. It carries histories, spatial habits and reputations while being repurposed for new forms of research and community. SQ: On the publication side, we’re developing a gd:c blog series that makes temporalities visible in a quick, accessible format. Short contributions from scholars from gd:c and beyond explore temporal dis:connectivity, referring to how divergent temporal frameworks shape global connections and disconnections, and how global connections, in turn, produce new temporal regimes. The topics range widely – fossils, dance, stars and more – but the throughline stays sharp: in a global perspective, we cannot think about time in the singular. CF: I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but once you tune in to laboratory logics, you start seeing them everywhere: in field stations, observatories, simulation facilities, archives, exhibition spaces, and art and design studios. Labs make complexity workable. They translate environments into standards, models, datasets and test beds, so ideas, methods and future imaginaries can travel. But they also make dis:connectivity uncomfortably visible: what gets extracted, what gets excluded, what becomes legible, and what remains opaque. That’s why our research focusses don’t stop at gd:c. They permeate scholarly and artistic collaborations as well as the events where our research moves into the public conversation. To name a few ventures into the broader debate, the gd:c Voices blog, our bi-annual journal static, and our ongoing film Q&A series, which brings global filmmakers and films into dialogue with wider audiences about globalisation’s many affects and effects.

gd:c magazine static

AG: And if you’re curious what else we have brewing, consider this your gentle nudge to stay in touch. Drop by our website and various social channels to keep your finger on the pulse of gd:c. We look forward to seeing you around to come dis:connect with us. Continue Reading
14 April 2026
In Voices Startseite

gdc voices part iii: research. in. action.

What collaborations, events and publications in the past, present or future show how the three research focuses are driving research at gd:c and beyond?

AG: If you want to see the three focusses in motion, the gd:c bridging conference 2025 is the obvious starting point. Bridging the initial era of gd:c (2021-2025) with the second (2025-2029), the bridging conference brought together the team, the directors, the advisory board as well as current and former fellows. This shows where cultural infrastructures stop being scenery and become methods of inquiry: the venues, platforms, institutions and networks that sustain cultural production while subtly shaping who is granted access, visibility and voice. SQ: And at the bridging conference, time became impossible to ignore. The panel on temporalities made that very clear. Elizabeth DeLoughrey took us into deep time and the deep sea. Siddharth Pandey followed movement, memory and transformation in Shimla in the Indian Himalayas. Ulinka Rublack unpacked the layered temporalities embedded in the global ecologies of early modern dress commodities. Different archives and different scales with a shared insight: globalisation is not only about space. It is also about pace, delay, repetition and uneven timing.

The temporalities panel at the gd:c bridging conference (left to right: Siddarth Pandey, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Ulinka Rublack, Susanne Quitmann; photo: gd:c)

CF: That again is where laboratories come in. The lab is not just a room with equipment; it is a way of making worlds comparable (and potentially improveable). Laboratories extract, isolate and translate environments into models and data. That makes connections travel. But it can also sever abstractions from the social, ecological and political conditions that sustain them. In that sense, labs connect infrastructures and temporalities: they organise access and authority, and they structure time through protocols, calibration, waiting and projection. SQ: Precisely such connections are why the gd:c summer school matters. Out of our diverse research environment, this particular format is where early career researchers and practitioners workshop methods together. It is one of gd:c’s most direct ways of building a shared language across disciplines and engaging with works in progress. AG: The 2024 summer school, Cultural infrastructure(s) – dis:connective perspectives, made that tangible. Organised by Christopher Balme, Nikolai Brandes, Hanni Geiger, Nic Leonhardt and Tom Menger, it brought grad students, postgrads and creative practitioners together in a week of lectures, master classes and hands-on formats, plus excursions that connect theory to real sites and their politics. Shannon Jackson’s lecture, Delivery systems: ecological infrastructures across the arts, set the tone. Infrastructures are the delivery systems for culture, power and possibility. Master classes by Eve Olney, Ursula Ströbele and Shannon Jackson deepened the conversation, while Dasha Sotnikova’s zine-making workshop translated analysis into practice. Excursions to Munich’s Architecture Museum and the Gasteig HP8 cultural complex grounded the discussion in the city’s institutional landscapes.

2024 summer school Cultural infrastructure(s) – dis:connective perspectives (Photos: gd:c)

CF: Looking ahead, the 2026 summer school, Worlds in the lab: experimental sites of dis:connectivity, continues that momentum by focussing on laboratories as built, protocol-driven environments. They are spaces that stage rehearsals, isolate variables and project futures. They promise preparedness and resilience, but they also raise hard questions about uneven labour, risk and exposure. Who gets included in the future worlds and scenarios that are being rehearsed, and who bears their costs? The programme foregrounds experimental pedagogical formats ranging from conceptual studios and hands-on exercises to field excursions in order to explore the lab itself as a method participants can actively stress test.

Worlds in the lab: experimental sites of dis:connectivity. gd:c summer school 2026.

SQ: And the 2027 summer school deals explicitly with temporalities. We want early career researchers to help shape the gd:c research focus on temporal dis:connectivity by tracing its conceptual and material tensions across fields and by co-developing a shared analytical framework for bringing diverse disciplinary projects into dialogue.  AG: Beyond recurring formats, the focusses also generate projects and publications. Sometimes the most immediate case is the institute itself. I am currently researching the chain of ownership of the building that houses gd:c, which was a house of haute couture until 1963. Its transformation into a research institute shows how cultural infrastructure is continuously reinterpreted and reactivated. The building is not a neutral container. It carries histories, spatial habits and reputations while being repurposed for new forms of research and community. SQ: On the publication side, we’re developing a gd:c blog series that makes temporalities visible in a quick, accessible format. Short contributions from scholars from gd:c and beyond explore temporal dis:connectivity, referring to how divergent temporal frameworks shape global connections and disconnections, and how global connections, in turn, produce new temporal regimes. The topics range widely – fossils, dance, stars and more – but the throughline stays sharp: in a global perspective, we cannot think about time in the singular. CF: I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but once you tune in to laboratory logics, you start seeing them everywhere: in field stations, observatories, simulation facilities, archives, exhibition spaces, and art and design studios. Labs make complexity workable. They translate environments into standards, models, datasets and test beds, so ideas, methods and future imaginaries can travel. But they also make dis:connectivity uncomfortably visible: what gets extracted, what gets excluded, what becomes legible, and what remains opaque. That’s why our research focusses don’t stop at gd:c. They permeate scholarly and artistic collaborations as well as the events where our research moves into the public conversation. To name a few ventures into the broader debate, the gd:c Voices blog, our bi-annual journal static, and our ongoing film Q&A series, which brings global filmmakers and films into dialogue with wider audiences about globalisation’s many affects and effects.

gd:c magazine static

AG: And if you’re curious what else we have brewing, consider this your gentle nudge to stay in touch. Drop by our website and various social channels to keep your finger on the pulse of gd:c. We look forward to seeing you around to come dis:connect with us. Continue Reading
13 April 2026
In Uncategorized, Voices Blog, Voices Startseite

gd:c voices: 3 postdocs – 3 research focusses – 2 questions

Dis:connectivity is at the heart of our work at gd:c. Instead of seeing globalisation as a linear process of increasing integration or fragmentation, dis:connectivity assumes connection and disconnection occur simultaneously through absences, detours and interruptions. Dis:connectivity is not an anomaly of globalisation; it’s what gives globalisation form. After having looked at absences, detours and interruptions across historical periods, regions and disciplines, we’re now turning our attention to cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity. These focusses help us to coordinate our research and to compare our results. They also let all our individual projects speak to one another with a common vocabulary. In this ReFocus mini-series, our three postdocs introduce the three research focusses they coordinate. Aliena Guggenberger, Susanne Quitmann and Clemens Finkelstein each reflect on how their particular focus enriches globalisation research and outline how their own projects and collaborations at gd:c are shaped through cultural infrastructures, temporalities and laboratories of dis:connectivity.

Aliena, Susanne and Clemens (from left to right)

What does your research focus explore?

AG: Infrastructure is commonly understood as a set of economic facilities, such as transportation and communication networks. A cultural perspective emphasises how infrastructure shapes social relations. For example, while airports facilitate physical exchange and connections around the globe, cultural infrastructure enables social interaction through various activities and spaces, including art. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, conceptualises representational spaces (unlike planned or conceived space) as users live in them, experience them and endow them with meaning through images, narratives and embodied practices. 

Marina Abramovíc: The Artist is Present, MoMA New York 2010 (Image: Andrew Russeth via Wikimedia)

For me, that means cultural infrastructure plays an active role in constituting our shared knowledge. Places like theatres, museums, libraries, archives and cultural heritage sites support the creation and preservation of artifacts and performances. In their digital expansion, these institutions operate as globally accessible platforms, revealing intersections between various collections, like Google Arts and Culture does. Yet such innovation can also concentrate power and restrict/limit access as well, since each institution curates its own content and presents its own narrative. I like exploring how the immediate geographic locations of cultural infrastructures contextualise their history and how they encourage participation and critical thinking beyond their locations.

National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)

SQ: Research on globalisation and global dis:connectivity has mostly focused on spaces and spatial relationships, like laboratories and cultural infrastructures. But time is just as important. Disruptions, absences and detours are as much about space as they are about time. They involve pauses, delays and haste. Time is a central variable in both the natural sciences and the humanities. In the sciences, time is mostly an objective, measurable value. In the humanities, by contrast, time is something people experience and interpret.

Watching time pass (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

Societies, groups and individuals can have different temporalities. Everyone experiences and lives in time, but research tends to overlook it. This began to change with the temporal turn in the humanities and the social sciences in the early 21st century, when researchers started to examine how time operates in areas ranging from the arts to social and environmental history. While some of this work touches on the issue of globalisation, and some studies of globalisation address temporality, the connection between processes of globalisation and temporality is still not fully understood.

Map of current de facto time zones as of March 2025 (UnaitxuGV, Heitordp and others via Wikimedia)

CF: I understand laboratories in a broad sense. For me, they include not only scientific research sites but also observatories, field stations, archives, exhibition spaces, simulation environments as well as artistic and design studios. Across these diverse settings, laboratories operate in similar ways: they simplify complexity, translate environments into models and data, and they stage the global as something that can be compared, tested and anticipated.

Laboratory settings across time and practice: (top) Art Lab in the Park by Street Lab, Queens Museum, NYC (2020) - a series of socially-distanced open-air art studio sessions, photo: © Street Lab (CC BY-NC 4.0); (left) An alchemist in his laboratory with his family: to the right they are shown calling at the poorhouse, destitute after the husband's failed experiments. Engraving after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c.1558. Wellcome Collection 35278i (Public Domain); (right) Quantum Lab - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) (2020). Two-color pulse sequences are generated for spin lifetime and spin coherence measurements in a dilution refrigerator. Photo: © ORNL (CC BY 2.0).

This is why I see laboratories as a connective hinge between the other research focusses at gd:c. As cultural infrastructures, they organise access, visibility and authority in knowledge production; as temporal devices, they structure anticipation, delay, repetition and projection. Laboratories are often imagined as controlled spaces that are removed from the world they study. Yet from the perspective of globalisation research, I approach them less as enclosed environments than as sites where global relations are assembled, interrupted and reconfigured. This helps me explore them as spaces of dis:connectivity in which elements of the world are temporarily extracted from their contexts, transformed into objects of knowledge and reconnected in new, often asymmetrical ways.

How does your research focus enrich globalisation research and how is the focus related to dis:connectivity?

CF: Seen through the lens of dis:connectivity, I approach laboratories as anything but neutral sites. The experiments they house select and abstract some connections while obscuring others. Knowledge produced in laboratories often circulates globally, while the material, social and ecological consequences of experimentation remain unevenly distributed. This asymmetry is no accident: historically, laboratories have been closely linked to imperial, extractive and modernising projects, while also serving as spaces of critique and alternative world-making.

Planetary laboratories and their dis:connected worlds of science, technology and extraction: (left) the Columbus Laboratory module aboard the International Space Station, where experiments abstract planetary processes under microgravity, photo: © NASA; (right) the Sunrise Dam Gold Mine in Western Australia, an extractive landscape whose materials — gold among them, integral to aerospace electronics—circulate into orbital infrastructures, even as the social and ecological costs of extraction remain unevenly grounded, photo: © Calistemon (CC BY-NC 4.0).

What interests me in particular is how laboratories today increasingly operate as anticipatory sites. In the context of climate change, technological acceleration and planetary transformation, they are where futures are modelled, risks are simulated, and thresholds are crossed. Studying laboratories as sites of dis:connectivity allows me to situate future-oriented debates in historical analyses of globalisation, tracing how experimental spaces and built environments have always shaped the governance of human and more-than-human futures under conditions of polycrisis and existential risk.

Anticipatory laboratories staging speculative futures of dis:connected globalisation beyond Earth. Cylindrical Colonies for a population of over a million (1976). Image: © NASA Ames Research Center / Rick Guidice - AC75-1086.

SQ: Our research at gd:c has only just begun to explore the relationship between temporality and global dis:connectivity. However, rereading existing scholarship through the lens of temporality, we see that the connection was there all along. Adding the two concepts of temporal dis:connectivity and dis:connected temporalities can only enrich our investigations. Temporality is central to how we experience globalisation and deglobalisation as well as to public debates about these phenomena, from fast-moving financial markets and disrupted supply chains to migrants waiting in transit and the idea of uneven historical change in different parts of the world.

Renaissance table clock (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

I am particularly interested in the latter phenomenon: the perception of diverging civilisational temporalities and varying cultural and political references between the present, the past and the future. I would argue that  focussing on temporalities in  the study of globalisation and dis:connectivity helps us better understand how global dis:connections are made, strained and experienced.

Arriving ship on a pocket watch (Image: Susanne Quitmann)

AG: Considering cultural infrastructure as a material framework helps make the highly theorised and complex research on globalisation more tangible to me. Cultural activities and spaces are visible platforms for discussing global narratives, whether they are brought to life on stage, presented loudly in public conversations or, more subtly, documented in books or materialised through exhibits. All these experiences foster critical thinking.  During the COVID-19 pandemic I first truly recognised the importance of cultural infrastructure not only as space for artistic expression, a repository of collective memory, but also as a connector. Debates about whether cultural infrastructure counts as an essential service shook its foundations and challenged its resilience. Ongoing cuts to the budgets of cultural institutions reinforce the injustice in disparate access and participation, forfeiting potential connection and replacing it with greater isolation.

Design exhibition (Salone des Mobile), Milan (Image: Aliena Guggenberger)

While these micro-fractures may be hard to see, the vulnerability of cultural infrastructure is unmistakable in its symbolic and public positioning. It is exposed to digital threats such as cyberattacks as well as to analogue forms of violence, including the deliberate targeting and destruction of cultural heritage sites in times of war.

Ruins of a theatre in Mariupol (Image: Lirhan2016 via Wikimedia)

In the current political climate, I think it is more essential than ever to promote and practice intercultural dialogue. It is therefore inspiring to see how the diverse approaches at gd:c – scholarly research as well as artists’ perspectives – uncover striking parallels in the study of global and local cultural infrastructure. This shared knowledge encourages a can-do attitude and collaboration, even beyond our time here. [Editor's note: the interview continues here.] Continue Reading
20 January 2026
In Voices Startseite

Rethinking cultural infrastructures in post-Assad Syria: a forum 



Christopher Balme


The forum participants in the gd:c library, i.e. our in-house cultural infrastructure.


– From 16 to 17 September 2025, global dis:connect hosted our first forum. The forum is a new format for gd:c to explore how support for the arts can be rethought in countries and regions undergoing major transitions. The arts are subject to the same forces of globalisation as other areas of cultural and social life. They are highly diverse and at the same time often remarkably similar on an institutional level. Art fairs, theatre, film and music festivals, as well as iconic architecture for their presentation can be encountered around the globe. Yet their status and forms of delivery vary in the extreme, especially in countries and regions marked by ‘turbulence’.[1]

Our forums address a set of recurrent questions. Who do these institutions serve? Do they justify their funding? Do they even receive public funding, or are they dependent on the vagaries of private philanthropy and sponsorship? Are they subject to direct political influence, or do they operate ‘at arms’ length’? Are arts institutions required to respond to touristic-heritage demands rather than artistic imperatives? How are local and national activities embedded in wider regional networks?

We devoted the first forum to post-Assad Syria as a reaction to the events of December 2024, which saw the fall of the Assad regime and the takeover by a former jihadist group led by Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. Once the most important cultural centre in the region, years of war and mass emigration have left the cultural landscape of Syria in disarray. The workshop gathered artists, directors of funding bodies and curators from Syria and neighbouring countries to rethink how cultural infrastructure might be reconceived going forward. The challenges facing cultural infrastructure globally pose themselves in Syria in extremis, as much material infrastructure has been destroyed and the former structures of a largely state-controlled arts scene no longer function.

The conditions in Syria drove us to pose many questions in the discussion. What remains of existing cultural infrastructure — both material and immaterial — and what new forms can still be imagined and built? What possibilities and promises can emerge from these shifting landscapes? Which networks can be activated or reconfigured, and how might the region's cultural life position itself within broader regional and global artistic ecologies, particularly in relation to questions of alliances, dependencies and hierarchies in the arts?

Christopher Balme; Sophie Eisenried, gd:c’s curator responsible for our cooperation with the arts; and Dr. Ziad Adwan, a Berlin-based Syrian dramatist, researcher and former lecturer at the Syria’s Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts, organised the event. With Adwan’s help, we assembled a group of largely Syrian participants, all of whom work outside the country: Abdallah Al-Kafri (Syria/Lebanon), Raed Assfour (Jordan),  Hala Khayat (Syria/Dubai), Hadeel Abdelhameed (Australia/Iraq), Helena Nassif (Lebanon), Junaid Sarieddeen (Lebanon) and Alma Salem (Syria/Canada). Anne Eberhard (Goethe Institute, Beirut) and the Syrian director and dramaturge, Rania Mleihi (Munich), joined us on the second day.

Planning began in early 2025 with the circulation of a concept paper outlining the idea of the forum and how we understand the term cultural infrastructure. We distinguish between three different forms:

    
 	
  • 

      
 	
    • material: buildings, venues, spaces, heritage sites;
      • 
 	
    • immaterial or intangible: the cultural capital of artists and creatives; their networks; sources of funding; and
      • 
 	
    • institutional: mainly cultural organisations, which in post-socialist societies such as Baathist Syria are/were still largely state-funded. In liberal democracies they are augmented by different kinds of commercial and non-profit organisations.
      • 

    

    • 


There are many ways to study infrastructure, which has become an expanding area of  interdisciplinary research. It is important to remember that infrastructure is not just purely functional but also has a rhetorical use, what the anthropologist Brian Larkin terms the ‘poetics of infrastructure’[2] and Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, have called the ‘promise of infrastructure’.[3]

A second stage of preparation involved mapping existing infrastructure in Syria using Google Maps. Such maps are commonplace, and many cities develop them as online resources. In the UK, the West Midlands Combined Authority, the Greater London Authority, and even local councils such as Milton Keynes provide them. Further afield, cultural infrastructure plans have also been developed in cities such as Sydney, Vancouver and Amsterdam. While such cities produce such maps for diverse reasons, ranging from self-promotion to a genuine need to inform their citizens, the situation in Syria meant it was a largely remedial and reparative exercise. After ten years of war, the question was: what still existed and in what state of repair? Our criteria indicated not just name and location but also functionality, genre and governance (figure 1)


A section of the cultural infrastructure map, which can be accessed here.


The workshop ran over two days and combined plenary sessions and breakout groups. The opening session took the map as a point of departure for an extended discussion of what cultural infrastructure entails in a postwar and post-socialist situation.

The workshop was overshadowed by recent events, namely massacres of civilians: Alawites in Latarkia and Bedouin and Druse minorities in Sweida. These events, plus the continuing war in Gaza, influenced the atmosphere of discussions. The optimism of early 2025 had given way to uncertainty and even pessimism, not only about the political future of the country but also whether the arts, broadly understood, would have a place in a regime controlled by a government with roots in jihadism.

An initial round of discussions opened a set of topics that would recur over the two days. For example, Helena Nassif asked what values can the arts defend, what meta-narratives do we want to construct? Alma Salem wondered how the arts can be embedded in the ongoing political discussions regarding the constitution, elections, and justice, especially when there is already evidence of individual freedoms being denied.

Hadeel Abdelhameed pointed to the example of Iraq, which had undergone similar levels of destruction and internecine violence. Now, however, cultural venues and the their spatial memories have gained importance, as evidenced in the renovation of Iraqi buildings in last two years, such as the city of Ur.

Abdallah Al-Kafri emphasised the importance of peer organisations in the region while acknowledging that philanthropy and donations had become more complicated with the welfare state in crisis. Currently, there are huge distractions and divisions amongst NGOs in the field of culture.

For Junaid Sarieddeen, director, dramaturge and founding member of the Beirut-based Zoukak Theatre Company, a key aim must be to sustain the region’s cultural and religious diversity, which often figures as its weakness because of its potential for dissension. That can/should, however, be used as an advantage. Syria has, as he put it, a ‘super local economy’, created by over a decade of war. Co-convenor Ziad Adwan argued that this element of locality meant that, in the transition phase at least, one should think in terms of pop-up or recurrent festivals rather than extended seasons. The cultural-infrastructure map could be used to identify venues. Raed Assfour, director of the Jordan-based Al-Balad Theatre, a multi-purpose cultural centre, emphasised the need to support regional movements.

In three breakout sessions, smaller groups focused on specific topics: alternative venues and training models, national vs. regional curating and models of support beyond state/public institutions. In the latter, for example, the role of NGOs, international funders and philanthropic foundations was discussed. While the traditional supporters, such as the European cultural institutes (British Council, Goethe Institute, Institut français etc.) certainly played a part in supporting local activities by, for example, creating safe spaces for performances and exhibitions outside state control, their financial contribution was relatively modest. Perhaps the most successful example of collaboration between locals and outsiders is in the field of archaeology, which can draw on exceptionally long-lasting partnerships going back decades. Participants emphasised the wide range of non-state and non-public funding. Apart from international philanthropy such as the Ford Foundation and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), which have a long history of supporting the arts, one should also remember that support can come from numerous sources, corporate as well as private families and their foundations. Oil companies have funded art books, churches have supported choral singing, and amateur traditions such as ancient Syrian chants, a Christian singing tradition going back many centuries with claims to the status of a immaterial cultural heritage.

The Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA), currently under construction, exemplifies the complex networks of support that extend beyond Lebanon and include UNESCO, the Washington-based Middle East Institute and the Getty Foundation. The Arab Theatre Training Centre (ATTC) based in Lebanon (executive director Raed Assfour) has received long-term support from SIDA, as well as other funding organisations such as the Swiss Agency for Development & Co-operation (SDC) in Jordan and the Anna Lindh Foundation. NGO funding is extremely complex, and there is too little research into the wider field of non-state funding.

The second day opened with a plenary paper by Anne Eberhard, current director of the Goethe-Institut (GI) in Beirut and responsible for re-opening the GI in Damascus. The closure of the institute in 2012 due to the war had been countered to some extent by the Damascus in Exile programme, which involved many artists from the Syrian diaspora, especially those based in Berlin. Eberhard outlined current activities and the difficulties in restarting support for artists in Syria, such as a new cultural project fund. Its implementation is still hampered by bureaucratic barriers, such as the difficulties in transferring funds to Syria, which is still not possible. The challenge is to rebuild the networks in Syria. In March 2025, a delegation led by the German Federal Foreign Office that included members from the Goethe-Institut, the German Archaeological Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visited the country during a period of optimism. Though the desire to reopen remains, the Goethe Institut is beholden to directives of the Federal Foreign Office.

The plenary sessions on second day were connected by the idea of ‘strengthening networks’ and looked at ‘community-based production’, ‘inter-city connections’, and ‘diasporic perspectives’. Community-based production belongs to the positively connoted terms, sometimes associated with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ‘community-building’, that circulate in the NGO world.[4] In a wide-ranging discussion participants interrogated both the term itself (‘how to translate the NGO term community into Arabic or other languages’) and its application, as for example when the Syrian government began implementing ‘community projects’ under the patronage of the First Lady, Asma Fawaz al-Assad, in the early 2000s. A positive example was the Lebanon-based theatre group Zoukak, which initiated drama therapy workshops in refugee camps during the 2006 war with Israel. A recurrent critique targeted the equation of ‘community’ with ‘village’ or similar traditional forms of organisation. Helena Nassif proposed redefining the term to mean ‘working with groups in a context’, which also include artist collectives and various kinds of humanitarian actions.

The topic of strengthening networks through intercity connections addressed a series of questions including whether artists in the region’s main cities form a shared community and how these ties might be strengthened. Another question revolved around competition vs. collaboration: when do inter-city cultural initiatives risk competing for the same limited funds instead of complementing each other? The importance of hub cities was also discussed, referring in this case Beirut and formerly Damascus. How can the latter regain that function? The current situation sees numerous smaller networks and a productive path might be to form coalitions to encourage them to come together.

The importance of diasporic networks for rebuilding cultural infrastructure in new Syria is unquestioned, but discussion focussed on the extent to which diasporic voices can legitimately speak for a future Syrian context and whether the current conditions even permit a large-scale return of exiled artists. On the other hand, diasporic institutions (festivals, galleries, archives) could serve as ‘extended infrastructure’ for Syria. There was consensus that future planning must include diasporic artists because of the sheer numbers involved. As the participants all belong in one way or another to the diasporic network, although it is not formally organised as such, everyone was ready to contribute to strengthening immaterial infrastructure — such as knowledge transfer, networks and funding models.

The final section of the workshop was an open mic and provided the opportunity for all participants to formulate plans and ideas for the future of the region, under the current or even a new government. Contributions ranged widely over deeply felt expressions of pain and loss over what has happened in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ formulated by Helena Nassif. It will be necessary to create for Syria, she argued, ‘a new sociality’ after the decades of oppression and war. Ziad Adwan asked: ‘what are my extensions today as a theatre maker towards Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians?’, thus positioning his artistic activity very much in a regional context. He wondered also how to evaluate the mapping project as well as how to record the deliberations of the forum itself (there is no audio or video recording). Perhaps one could think of a medium-term research project. Alma Salem stressed the need to reframe the region away from purely geopolitical arguments to geocultural ones to create more positive, constructive narratives. The regionalisation discussed in the workshop is not an objective to be achieved but is an already existing organic reality.

The workshop was a short but intensive interaction bringing together theatre directors, curators, actors, cultural policy makers who were either Syrian or had strong ties to the country. Most described themselves either as expatriates or in exile. All were dedicated to re-establishing the once-vibrant arts scene in Syria, particularly Damascus, but also in other cities such as Aleppo. It was clear at the end of the two days that the forum format had initiated intensive discussions, renewed ties and laid the foundation for further initiatives. Much will depend on the stabilisation of an extremely fragile political situation and whether the current ‘transitional’ government can reconcile its Islamist orientation with the freedom of expression necessary for artistic culture to be re-established.

[1] Milena Dragićević Šešić and Sanjin Dragićević, Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable Quality Management: navigating the arts through the winds of change, trans. Vladimir Ivir, ed. Esther Banev and Francis Garcia (Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation & Boekmanstudies, 2005).

[2] Brian Larkin, 'The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure', Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013).

[3] Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, 'Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure', in The Promise of Infrastructure, ed. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

[4] Hossein Mousazadeh, 'Unraveling the Nexus between Community Development and Sustainable Development Goals: A Comprehensive Mapping', Community Development 56, no. 2 (2024) doi:10.1080/15575330.2024.2388097.

bibliography

Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel. 'Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure'. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel,  Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Dragićević Šešić, Milena and Sanjin Dragićević. Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable Quality Management: navigating the arts through the winds of change. Translated by Vladimir Ivir. Edited by Esther Banev and Francis Garcia. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation & Boekmanstudies, 2005.

Larkin, Brian. 'The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure'. [In English]. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-43.

Mousazadeh, Hossein. 'Unraveling the Nexus between Community Development and Sustainable Development Goals: A Comprehensive Mapping'. Community Development 56, no. 2 (2024): 276-302. https://doi.org/doi:10.1080/15575330.2024.2388097.                        Continue Reading
                        

	                        	

		27 November 2025
	

	                                                

                    

                

            

        

        
        

            

                                    

	                    

	
    
			


                    

                                

                    

	                    	
		In
		Blog 2025, Voices Blog
	
	                    

		 Rethinking cultural infrastructures in post-Assad Syria: a forum 
	                    	                    

[editor's note: the gd:c blog has been on hiatus for several months because life got in the way, but we're thrilled to be back with this post about one of our in-house events and written by one of our directors. Enjoy.]


christopher balme


The forum participants in the gd:c library, i.e. our in-house cultural infrastructure.


From 16 to 17 September 2025, global dis:connect hosted our first forum. The forum is a new format for gd:c to explore how support for the arts can be rethought in countries and regions undergoing major transitions. The arts are subject to the same forces of globalisation as other areas of cultural and social life. They are highly diverse and at the same time often remarkably similar on an institutional level. Art fairs, theatre, film and music festivals, as well as iconic architecture for their presentation can be encountered around the globe. Yet their status and forms of delivery vary in the extreme, especially in countries and regions marked by ‘turbulence’.[1]

Our forums address a set of recurrent questions. Who do these institutions serve? Do they justify their funding? Do they even receive public funding, or are they dependent on the vagaries of private philanthropy and sponsorship? Are they subject to direct political influence, or do they operate ‘at arms’ length’? Are arts institutions required to respond to touristic-heritage demands rather than artistic imperatives? How are local and national activities embedded in wider regional networks?

We devoted the first forum to post-Assad Syria as a reaction to the events of December 2024, which saw the fall of the Assad regime and the takeover by a former jihadist group led by Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. Once the most important cultural centre in the region, years of war and mass emigration have left the cultural landscape of Syria in disarray. The workshop gathered artists, directors of funding bodies and curators from Syria and neighbouring countries to rethink how cultural infrastructure might be reconceived going forward. The challenges facing cultural infrastructure globally pose themselves in Syria in extremis, as much material infrastructure has been destroyed and the former structures of a largely state-controlled arts scene no longer function.

The conditions in Syria drove us to pose many questions in the discussion. What remains of existing cultural infrastructure — both material and immaterial — and what new forms can still be imagined and built? What possibilities and promises can emerge from these shifting landscapes? Which networks can be activated or reconfigured, and how might the region's cultural life position itself within broader regional and global artistic ecologies, particularly in relation to questions of alliances, dependencies and hierarchies in the arts?

Christopher Balme; Sophie Eisenried, gd:c’s curator responsible for our cooperation with the arts; and Dr. Ziad Adwan, a Berlin-based Syrian dramatist, researcher and former lecturer at the Syria’s Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts, organised the event. With Adwan’s help, we assembled a group of largely Syrian participants, all of whom work outside the country: Abdallah Al-Kafri (Syria/Lebanon), Raed Assfour (Jordan),  Hala Khayat (Syria/Dubai), Hadeel Abdelhameed (Australia/Iraq), Helena Nassif (Lebanon), Junaid Sarieddeen (Lebanon) and Alma Salem (Syria/Canada). Anne Eberhard (Goethe Institute, Beirut) and the Syrian director and dramaturge, Rania Mleihi (Munich), joined us on the second day.

Planning began in early 2025 with the circulation of a concept paper outlining the idea of the forum and how we understand the term cultural infrastructure. We distinguish between three different forms:

    
 	
  • 

      
 	
    • material: buildings, venues, spaces, heritage sites;
      • 
 	
    • immaterial or intangible: the cultural capital of artists and creatives; their networks; sources of funding; and
      • 
 	
    • institutional: mainly cultural organisations, which in post-socialist societies such as Baathist Syria are/were still largely state-funded. In liberal democracies they are augmented by different kinds of commercial and non-profit organisations.
      • 

    

    • 


There are many ways to study infrastructure, which has become an expanding area of  interdisciplinary research. It is important to remember that infrastructure is not just purely functional but also has a rhetorical use, what the anthropologist Brian Larkin terms the ‘poetics of infrastructure’[2] and Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, have called the ‘promise of infrastructure’.[3]

A second stage of preparation involved mapping existing infrastructure in Syria using Google Maps. Such maps are commonplace, and many cities develop them as online resources. In the UK, the West Midlands Combined Authority, the Greater London Authority, and even local councils such as Milton Keynes provide them. Further afield, cultural infrastructure plans have also been developed in cities such as Sydney, Vancouver and Amsterdam. While such cities produce such maps for diverse reasons, ranging from self-promotion to a genuine need to inform their citizens, the situation in Syria meant it was a largely remedial and reparative exercise. After ten years of war, the question was: what still existed and in what state of repair? Our criteria indicated not just name and location but also functionality, genre and governance (figure 1)

 


A section of the cultural infrastructure map, which can be accessed here.


 

The workshop ran over two days and combined plenary sessions and breakout groups. The opening session took the map as a point of departure for an extended discussion of what cultural infrastructure entails in a postwar and post-socialist situation.

The workshop was overshadowed by recent events, namely massacres of civilians: Alawites in Latarkia and Bedouin and Druse minorities in Sweida. These events, plus the continuing war in Gaza, influenced the atmosphere of discussions. The optimism of early 2025 had given way to uncertainty and even pessimism, not only about the political future of the country but also whether the arts, broadly understood, would have a place in a regime controlled by a government with roots in jihadism.

An initial round of discussions opened a set of topics that would recur over the two days. For example, Helena Nassif asked what values can the arts defend, what meta-narratives do we want to construct? Alma Salem wondered how the arts can be embedded in the ongoing political discussions regarding the constitution, elections, and justice, especially when there is already evidence of individual freedoms being denied.

Hadeel Abdelhameed pointed to the example of Iraq, which had undergone similar levels of destruction and internecine violence. Now, however, cultural venues and the their spatial memories have gained importance, as evidenced in the renovation of Iraqi buildings in last two years, such as the city of Ur.

Abdallah Al-Kafri emphasised the importance of peer organisations in the region while acknowledging that philanthropy and donations had become more complicated with the welfare state in crisis. Currently, there are huge distractions and divisions amongst NGOs in the field of culture.

For Junaid Sarieddeen, director, dramaturge and founding member of the Beirut-based Zoukak Theatre Company, a key aim must be to sustain the region’s cultural and religious diversity, which often figures as its weakness because of its potential for dissension. That can/should, however, be used as an advantage. Syria has, as he put it, a ‘super local economy’, created by over a decade of war. Co-convenor Ziad Adwan argued that this element of locality meant that, in the transition phase at least, one should think in terms of pop-up or recurrent festivals rather than extended seasons. The cultural-infrastructure map could be used to identify venues. Raed Assfour, director of the Jordan-based Al-Balad Theatre, a multi-purpose cultural centre, emphasised the need to support regional movements.

In three breakout sessions, smaller groups focused on specific topics: alternative venues and training models, national vs. regional curating and models of support beyond state/public institutions. In the latter, for example, the role of NGOs, international funders and philanthropic foundations was discussed. While the traditional supporters, such as the European cultural institutes (British Council, Goethe Institute, Institut français etc.) certainly played a part in supporting local activities by, for example, creating safe spaces for performances and exhibitions outside state control, their financial contribution was relatively modest. Perhaps the most successful example of collaboration between locals and outsiders is in the field of archaeology, which can draw on exceptionally long-lasting partnerships going back decades. Participants emphasised the wide range of non-state and non-public funding. Apart from international philanthropy such as the Ford Foundation and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), which have a long history of supporting the arts, one should also remember that support can come from numerous sources, corporate as well as private families and their foundations. Oil companies have funded art books, churches have supported choral singing, and amateur traditions such as ancient Syrian chants, a Christian singing tradition going back many centuries with claims to the status of a immaterial cultural heritage.

The Beirut Museum of Art (BeMA), currently under construction, exemplifies the complex networks of support that extend beyond Lebanon and include UNESCO, the Washington-based Middle East Institute and the Getty Foundation. The Arab Theatre Training Centre (ATTC) based in Lebanon (executive director Raed Assfour) has received long-term support from SIDA, as well as other funding organisations such as the Swiss Agency for Development & Co-operation (SDC) in Jordan and the Anna Lindh Foundation. NGO funding is extremely complex, and there is too little research into the wider field of non-state funding.

The second day opened with a plenary paper by Anne Eberhard, current director of the Goethe-Institut (GI) in Beirut and responsible for re-opening the GI in Damascus. The closure of the institute in 2012 due to the war had been countered to some extent by the Damascus in Exile programme, which involved many artists from the Syrian diaspora, especially those based in Berlin. Eberhard outlined current activities and the difficulties in restarting support for artists in Syria, such as a new cultural project fund. Its implementation is still hampered by bureaucratic barriers, such as the difficulties in transferring funds to Syria, which is still not possible. The challenge is to rebuild the networks in Syria. In March 2025, a delegation led by the German Federal Foreign Office that included members from the Goethe-Institut, the German Archaeological Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visited the country during a period of optimism. Though the desire to reopen remains, the Goethe Institut is beholden to directives of the Federal Foreign Office.

The plenary sessions on second day were connected by the idea of ‘strengthening networks’ and looked at ‘community-based production’, ‘inter-city connections’, and ‘diasporic perspectives’. Community-based production belongs to the positively connoted terms, sometimes associated with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of ‘community-building’, that circulate in the NGO world.[4] In a wide-ranging discussion participants interrogated both the term itself (‘how to translate the NGO term community into Arabic or other languages’) and its application, as for example when the Syrian government began implementing ‘community projects’ under the patronage of the First Lady, Asma Fawaz al-Assad, in the early 2000s. A positive example was the Lebanon-based theatre group Zoukak, which initiated drama therapy workshops in refugee camps during the 2006 war with Israel. A recurrent critique targeted the equation of ‘community’ with ‘village’ or similar traditional forms of organisation. Helena Nassif proposed redefining the term to mean ‘working with groups in a context’, which also include artist collectives and various kinds of humanitarian actions.

The topic of strengthening networks through intercity connections addressed a series of questions including whether artists in the region’s main cities form a shared community and how these ties might be strengthened. Another question revolved around competition vs. collaboration: when do inter-city cultural initiatives risk competing for the same limited funds instead of complementing each other? The importance of hub cities was also discussed, referring in this case Beirut and formerly Damascus. How can the latter regain that function? The current situation sees numerous smaller networks and a productive path might be to form coalitions to encourage them to come together.

The importance of diasporic networks for rebuilding cultural infrastructure in new Syria is unquestioned, but discussion focussed on the extent to which diasporic voices can legitimately speak for a future Syrian context and whether the current conditions even permit a large-scale return of exiled artists. On the other hand, diasporic institutions (festivals, galleries, archives) could serve as ‘extended infrastructure’ for Syria. There was consensus that future planning must include diasporic artists because of the sheer numbers involved. As the participants all belong in one way or another to the diasporic network, although it is not formally organised as such, everyone was ready to contribute to strengthening immaterial infrastructure — such as knowledge transfer, networks and funding models.

The final section of the workshop was an open mic and provided the opportunity for all participants to formulate plans and ideas for the future of the region, under the current or even a new government. Contributions ranged widely over deeply felt expressions of pain and loss over what has happened in the ‘cradle of civilisation’ formulated by Helena Nassif. It will be necessary to create for Syria, she argued, ‘a new sociality’ after the decades of oppression and war. Ziad Adwan asked: ‘what are my extensions today as a theatre maker towards Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians?’, thus positioning his artistic activity very much in a regional context. He wondered also how to evaluate the mapping project as well as how to record the deliberations of the forum itself (there is no audio or video recording). Perhaps one could think of a medium-term research project. Alma Salem stressed the need to reframe the region away from purely geopolitical arguments to geocultural ones to create more positive, constructive narratives. The regionalisation discussed in the workshop is not an objective to be achieved but is an already existing organic reality.

The workshop was a short but intensive interaction bringing together theatre directors, curators, actors, cultural policy makers who were either Syrian or had strong ties to the country. Most described themselves either as expatriates or in exile. All were dedicated to re-establishing the once-vibrant arts scene in Syria, particularly Damascus, but also in other cities such as Aleppo. It was clear at the end of the two days that the forum format had initiated intensive discussions, renewed ties and laid the foundation for further initiatives. Much will depend on the stabilisation of an extremely fragile political situation and whether the current ‘transitional’ government can reconcile its Islamist orientation with the freedom of expression necessary for artistic culture to be re-established.

 

[1] Milena Dragićević Šešić and Sanjin Dragićević, Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable Quality Management: navigating the arts through the winds of change, trans. Vladimir Ivir, ed. Esther Banev and Francis Garcia (Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation & Boekmanstudies, 2005).

[2] Brian Larkin, 'The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure', Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013).

[3] Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, 'Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure', in The Promise of Infrastructure, ed. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

[4] Hossein Mousazadeh, 'Unraveling the Nexus between Community Development and Sustainable Development Goals: A Comprehensive Mapping', Community Development 56, no. 2 (2024) doi:10.1080/15575330.2024.2388097.

bibliography

Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel. 'Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure'. In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel,  Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Dragićević Šešić, Milena and Sanjin Dragićević. Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable Quality Management: navigating the arts through the winds of change. Translated by Vladimir Ivir. Edited by Esther Banev and Francis Garcia. Amsterdam: European Cultural Foundation & Boekmanstudies, 2005.

Larkin, Brian. 'The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure'. [In English]. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327-43.

Mousazadeh, Hossein. 'Unraveling the Nexus between Community Development and Sustainable Development Goals: A Comprehensive Mapping'. Community Development 56, no. 2 (2024): 276-302. https://doi.org/doi:10.1080/15575330.2024.2388097.                        Continue Reading
                        

	                        	

		25 November 2025