The Global Cultural Relations Programme 2021-2022

In depths of covid-confinement, shortly after moving to Paris in late 2020, I found myself professionally alone. I wasn’t sure whether my work in cultural relations, programming and film culture could even continue with filmming rendered impossible and people unable to gather. I was desperately seeking a community to open out conversations about the things that were worrying me, and to connect to people who were somehow hopeful about the possibility of keeping artists in work, and making that work accessible in meaningful ways.

The world was closing down, but I found a little tunnel leading somewhere to lightness through the Global Cultural Relations Programme. Organised through EU funding streams, the programme is truly global, and welcomes cultural practitioners from across the world to come together and find connections, possibilities and new ways of working. In 2021, I took part in the programme online. I had some remarkable and life-changing conversations with peers (who are now very firmly friends) about decolonial practice, about peacemaking practice, and about thinking beyond the ‘project’ as the basis of funding. In early 2022, the programme took place in real life with a new cohort in Istanbul - and in November 2022, the GCRP brought both cohorts together for a reunion in Brussels. I have made friends for life in this space, a space that feels full of learning and unlearning, of difference and connectedness, of radical rethinking. I would highly recommend it to anyone working in culture environments.