Statement from the Mediterranean Hub of Trans Europe Halles

We are a group of members, associates, partners of Trans Europe Halles as well as its Managing Director and Coordinator of the Mediterranean Hub gathered in Nicosia, Cyprus this week, to launch the network’s Mediterranean Hub.

We are from Cyprus, Lebanon, Italy, Malta, Syria, France, Morocco, and Albania.
We have a long-standing interest to collaborate, through arts and culture, in this remarkable area of the world we live and work in, which has been the cradle of so many cultures and civilisations, myths, tragedies, and continuous exchanges.

Nicosia is a city that bears the scar of the absurdity of political history. Here, the European Union ends right in the middle of the old city, divided in two. The border is a barbed wire fence and a UN patrolled buffer zone that can only be crossed through a few checkpoints.

As we are meeting here, us Mediterraneans, we are thinking and talking about the terrible human tragedy that is unfolding under our eyes, a few miles from here, in Palestine and Israel.

As cultural practitioners, we know that cultures only exist in relation to one another. We experience this every day. And what we call Culture is nothing else but a fluid capacity to construct new vocabularies, to weave communities together, to generate societies beyond borders, divisions, and nations.

As cultural practitioners, we believe in conflict resolution through the full acknowledgement of the other, through dialogue, truth, repair, and reconciliation.

We are tired of condemning the obvious, the killing, the destruction, the brutality.

We acknowledge that tensions are part of every one of us, that they exist between all of us.  But we believe that what makes us a human community, is our capacity to acknowledge and overcome these tensions, and to refuse violence altogether. We believe in a human community beyond borders and nations.

As cultural practitioners, we create spaces for our associated cultures, public spaces where our shared stories and history can coexist.

We self-determine spaces for dialogue and for the resolution of tensions, for bringing together different visions of how to inhabit the same space, the same earth.

In the face of the crisis of democracy, in the face of the climate crisis, and in the face of wars, our job here and now is to assert that cultural welfare is a healing process.

Our lives are crossed and divided by powerful conflicts and lines of tension, but our responsibility here and now is not to fuel them but to create more shared spaces for dialogue, especially where those are the most difficult to open.

And to safeguard these spaces, there is an urgency to decolonise, denationalise, deterritorialise and deindividualise our minds.

Nicosia, Friday, Oct 21, 2023,

NIMAC, Nicosia, Cyprus
Lo Stato dei Luoghi, Italy
Tiro Association for Arts, Tyre, Lebanon
Anima, Marrakech, Morocco
La Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, France
Gabriel Caruana Foundation, Malta
Bloom, Mezzago, Italy
Associazione Oltre, Bologna, Italy