EU Capitals of Care?

Mary Ann DeVlieg, PhD, Vise President of Ettijahat – Independent Culture

7 May 2026

Keynote speech for the meeting of Culture Next, the network of European Capitals of Culture (ECoCs), in Larnaka (Larnaca ECoC 2030) from 6-8 May 2026. https://larnaka2030.eu/

I arrived in Europe some 50 years ago. As a confident young white woman from a rich country, I found Europe a welcoming place. It is said that we, ‘new Europeans’ are the most loyal ones to the idea of the unified, shared cultural space. Although I now have Belgian citizenship, I was not born there, and my feelings toward Belgium and Europe are due to what I have learned from being here, and how people here have cared for me. But I don’t want to talk about me; I want to focus on YOU.

You are all either planning, executing or sun-setting on the massive project of organising a European Capital of Culture. It means you are INCREDIBLY important. Not in an egoistic way, but in a very responsible position of INFLUENCING. If you have not already felt this, just sit with it here for a moment: your actions might give one young artist their first substantive support; it might give an older artist the chance to do something they’ve always dreamt of doing. Your programme might make one person in your community feel a bit brighter, a bit more needed, less isolated and joyful. Without even getting into the well-known spin-offs of art and cultural activities, just the INTRINSIC effect of confronting an artwork may make some people more thoughtful, slowing down their lives, making them more attentive and sensitive for a while. But you are not only programming to affect individuals, but rather to have a positive influence on whole cities and the communities in them —how individuals in those communities relate to one another, the environment and the world at large, and how their values come up against one another, mingle and mirror across divides, crossing borders.

Now, there is a lot of rhetorical cultural policy language about ‘European values’: human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights, including minority rights. The member states share a "society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail".

This is in Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union and I would say that these are not at all exclusive to Europe!

But...what on earth are you going to programme to reflect all of this?! And ECoCs are supposed to leave legacies. Will your legacy be only in the built infrastructure or will it be in the changes in your communities’ mindsets, in concrete openness to others, in a more tangible respect shown in day-to-day life?  Will your community understand better why artists need artistic freedom to express, the ‘so-called fresh air of society,’ and will your audiences develop enough curiosity to engage with and discuss challenging ideas instead of merely turning their backs on them?

Your influence is not a small thing. And perhaps it is not only in the ‘what’ of programming but in the ‘how’.

This brings to mind the qualities of TRUST, RESPONSIBILITY and CARE. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote: Another, by relying on me, renders me accountable for my acts … it is in the midst of others that we become effectively responsible. Inversely, as soon as the other relies on or trusts in me, what he or she expects is precisely that I shall keep my word and behave as... the author of my own acts.[1]

When we influence, we are trusted, we are accountable to the communities who trust us, the funders who subsidize us, the artists who are commissioned by us or ...the colleagues who work alongside us.  We are accountable for these values.

And this brings up the third quality:  care.  In 2024 I completed a PhD. It focused on issues around the rights and citizenship of artists who had been persecuted in their home countries and relocated for safety to countries in the EU, as well as the policies and practices of the arts and culture sector that either supported and warmly welcomed them or did not. I dived deep into the ethics of care. It is a whole branch of philosophy, but care is also a practice that we ‘perform’ when we concretely care about the lives we influence.

In her 2024 book, ‘Imperfect Solidarities’, the writer and art critic, Aruna D’Souza wrote unromantically about care: Care before love, or care before empathy, this is the politics I aspire to.  A solidarity that comes very directly from a commitment to care because that is the most basic obligation we have toward one another. If empathy or love develop along the way, that is a gift, but not a requirement.[2]

Care is an obligation from one human being to another that produces solidarity. Why am I wearing this keffiyeh? Is it to look cool or hip? No, it reflects the more than twenty years that I have worked with colleagues In Palestine, then Lebanon and Syria. In wearing a symbol of solidarity THIS IS THE VERY LEAST I CAN DO. 

In my thesis, I applied the ethics of care to the cultural networks in Europe. Now, I have worked in the arts sector all my life. I have been very critical about certain behaviours of my sector where I saw that rhetorical cultural policy language was not matched in actual practice. A key concept I used was putting ethics into action.

Care ethics cites five core values: attentiveness (seeing what is happening around you); responsibility, (feeling you have a role to play);  competence (having or getting the competence required in the situation); responsiveness (insuring that the person or people you are working with are aware and agree with the action to be taken – at best are even co-creating it); and finally trust and solidarity (standing up together on an equal basis to support one another).

This ethics of care as a human obligation and a collective solidarity is pertinent to the ECoCs. In the last few years there has been a focus on care in the arts sector, and some very good ‘fair practices’ have been adopted by arts organisations, but we are still seeing artists, curators, staff members as well as managers, being overworked and underpaid. To use a meme, ‘artists gonna art’ and ‘cultural operators gonna operate’ because they believe so deeply in the work they are doing, and so it’s easy to exploit them. For years I have been quite frightened of ECoCs!  I saw too many of my dear friends burnt out, even hospitalised, or fired, kicked out, even sued.  All of those friends suffered because they cared so very much about the arts and cultural work they were organising – but who cared for them?  

One way of practicing care and solidarity is in the arts and culture networks.

A bit of history: I was not the first person on the scene when the early cultural networks were being formed, but I was only a couple of years behind. IETM, the network for contemporary performing arts, was founded in 1989 and I became a member in 1992, then joined as Secretary General in 1994 and left in 2013. The early days were marked by passionate solidarity, in fact my first official act was to co-write a declaration of support for the cultural sector in Romania whose government was threatening its independence. Cultural operators were excited about meeting counterparts, to demonstrate that arts and culture was as important to the EU as coal and steel. This excitement was not limited to the then-EU member states but soon expanded to our colleagues in Central and South Eastern Europe, to artists south of the Mediterranean, in the USA and beyond. We were getting together to meet because we shared a belief in artists.

It is important to note that this was not then about money. There were no subsidies for collaborative arts projects as there are now. There was no, or hardly any, EU cultural policy to speak of. The European Commission was actually against us, using the catch phrase ‘networking means NOT working’ to mock us. The Danish and German national arts institutions called us ‘unwelcome intermediaries between artists and arts organisations’. These early arts and culture networks fought hard for recognition and history has proved us right. But in our foundation years, we did not immediately pitch projects looking for finance; we aimed to establish trust with like-minded colleagues. My friend and former colleague, Toni Gonzales, has recently defined the network then as a’ place of connection and intellectual friction’. It was on the basis of trust that we felt we could then create artistic collaborations. We were crossing borders to exchange ideas with professionals we did not yet know, working in conditions we did not yet understand, in order to learn and make us all better at our work. This quotation from Ali Smith’s novel ‘Spring’ describes it well, using the narrator, a young teenaged girl who, we eventually realise, is searching for her mother who has been taken away by immigration police: What if, the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides places. We said, this border holds together two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.[3]

This quotation always makes me shiver because it speaks of how we enlarge ourselves, we become bigger/our minds become deeper, by crossing borders, whether territorial, class, race or religion. 

Cultural networks can be seen as, what in political science are called epistemic communities, or transnational advocacy networks.: ‘..networks of professionals with recognised expertise and competence... an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge ... (Haas, 1992: 3). What I find most interesting is that these epistemic communities is that they don’t work material gain but ‘in fostering the adoption of the community’s policy project’ (Sebenius, 1992: 325).

I do not believe it is possible to be a network, arts or otherwise, without having a political weight. A group of professionals with knowledge, sharing, discussing and thus developing that knowledge adds to the existing wisdom in their community and this is a political act. CN is a network but you are also all networkers, or ‘nodes’ that carry information and approaches from one network to another. So I highly recommend, if you are not already, to become active in any of the now many cultural networks in Europe and beyond, for mutual inspiration that stimulates new ideas and partnerships. Whether it is On the Move and its arts mobility focus, TransEuropeHalles working with grassroots arts centres, IETM for performing arts, Transartists for artist residencies, or Culture Action Europe which is the overall network to discuss and influence cultural policy in Europe.

To end, I recently read an article critiquing the fact that everything, including and maybe especially the arts, has been instrumentalised....[4] It’s true, I think, that the arts sector has, let’s say, allowed itself to be manipulated into using instrumentalising arguments, especially economic ones. It is regrettable, but also almost impossible to avoid as it is hard to do anything without subsidy, in other words, money.

Even the most illuminated and consultative public policy is top-down, written by policymakers who represent power, thus automatically or inadvertently manipulating those whom the policy is for.

And yet there is a paradox here: democracy is bottom-up. The strongest impetus for change comes from movements of people, of communities. The ECoCs are rooted in communities. Thus the best thing you, influential ECoCs, can do is to listen and amplify the ideas and approaches of your communities and artists up to the public policy level. This is so critical today when democracy is in decline in so many places - including EU countries. And we ALL have to work at this, no matter where we are or what we do, in our spheres of influence large or small. 

What is at stake?  A Europe that I believe in, still despite everything, and I hope you do too.  A Europe of borders to cross, a Europe of care and freedom, of respectful exchange. A Europe of justice.  Well actually... all of those things in the policy documents.  But it will take work, care and solidarity.

To watch the full speech, please click here.