In collaboration with De Appel, on 21 May between 18:30—20:30 CEST, we present the event "Culture is — arts, imagination, and the planetary now", exploring culture as an urgent necessity that offers relational language, radical imagination, and care.
Cover image courtesy of 2025 Building Beyond Fellow Ìfẹ́olúwa Ọ̀ṣúnkọ̀yà.
In this conversation, Teesa Bahana (Director of 32° East, a not-for-profit contemporary art space in Uganda, currently on study leave) and Ola Hassanain (artist and architect) will explore our time of ecological collapse, political fragmentation, and growing inequality, in which culture is not a luxury—it is a necessity. Yet around the world, artists and cultural spaces are under threat: defunded, censored, co-opted, or erased entirely. In this moment of planetary crisis, the arts provide a language of relation, a tool for radical imagination, and a practice of care that transcends borders.
What forms of solidarity, policy, and institutional rethinking are needed to sustain artistic communities across geographies? What does it mean to cultivate a planetary consciousness rooted in justice and imagination?
Culture shapes how we live, how we move through the world, and how we relate to the land and to each other. As civic and artistic freedoms shrink under the weight of nationalism, austerity, and extractive systems, we must ask not only how to defend cultural space, but how to expand it.
Featured speakers
This conversation is part of Exchanges, the Fund’s platform for creative cross-pollination that connects our international network with Amsterdam’s cultural landscape while building long-lasting relationships across the city’s diverse artistic scenes. Exchanges is made possible through the generous support from the City of Amsterdam.
