coculture’s mission is to build durable cultural infrastructures through which artists and cultural workers, particularly those from the Global South and contexts shaped by displacement, conflict, and political violence, can sustain their practices, exercise professional and civic agency, and shape the institutions and narratives that define cultural life. Through platforms, archives, exhibitions, public programmes, and translocal partnerships, coculture understands art not as representation alone, but as a civic practice capable of activating memory, confronting erasure, producing knowledge, and opening collective futures. Its work connects local, diasporic, and international contexts while advancing artistic freedom, care, accountability, equity, and shared institutional responsibility.

→ Avance artistic production as civic agency, recognising contemporary art as a space for memory, accountability, dissent, and collective imagination—not as symbolic representation alone.

→ Develop participatory governance models grounded in transparency, shared responsibility, and contextual ethics, with methods adaptable to conflict-affected and transitional settings.

→ Create platforms for translocal exchange and co-production that connect local, diasporic, and international actors across geographies, languages, and political realities.

→ Preserve and activate cultural memory through research, archiving, documentation, and public programmes that resist erasure and contribute to future-oriented forms of justice.

→ Embed care, safeguarding, and equity across cultural work, with particular attention to gender justice, access, representation, and the well-being of artists, participants, and collaborators.

→ Shift cultural authorship and institutional power towards practitioners from the Global South and conflict-affected contexts, challenging extractive, colonial, and depoliticised cultural frameworks.

→ Strengthen institutional resilience and independence through diversified funding, responsible partnerships, transparent governance, and long-term organisational capacity.

✦︎ Autonomy and Artistic Freedom
coculture protects the independence of artistic and institutional practice from political, commercial, and donor interference.

✦︎ Art as Civic Practice
Art is understood not only as expression, but as a means of producing knowledge, activating memory, opening public dialogue, and building collective agency.

✦︎ Equity and Gender Justice
coculture recognises and actively addresses historical and systemic inequalities in access, representation, resources, and decision-making, with particular attention to gender and intersecting forms of exclusion.

✦︎ Collective Governance
The organisation values shared responsibility, transparent decision-making, and structures that distribute knowledge and power rather than concentrating them.

✦︎ Care and Safeguarding
Its work is grounded in dignity, consent, protection from harm, and responsibility towards artists, participants, staff, partners, and communities.

✦︎ Ethical Responsibility
coculture manages its relationships and resources transparently, addresses conflicts of interest, and remains accountable for the consequences of its decisions.

✦︎ Memory and Accountability
coculture treats cultural memory as a public responsibility, connecting documentation and artistic practice to questions of justice, erasure, and historical accountability.

✦︎ Courage
The organisation unafraid to challenge the status quo, confront injustice, and take risks in pursuing a more equitable and inclusive world.

✦︎ Contextual Sensitivity
Its programmes respond to the political, cultural, and social realities of each context rather than imposing universal models or extractive frameworks.

✦︎ Translocal Solidarity
The organisation builds reciprocal relationships across local, diasporic, and international contexts without positioning one geography as the centre and others as the periphery.

✦︎ Sustainability and Resilience
coculture develops environmentally aware, financially responsible, and institutionally durable practices designed to outlast individual projects and funding cycles.

‍coculture began in Berlin in 2015 in response to a practical rupture. As the war in Syria forced growing numbers into exile, many artists arriving in Europe found themselves separated from place, and from peers, professional relationships and the institutional knowledge through which artistic practice is sustained. Conceptual artist Khaled Barakeh began identifying and reconnecting Syrian artists through an informal mailing list. The gesture was modest; the need it revealed was structural.

The mailing list soon became a channel for circulating calls, deadlines, contacts, translations and advice on unfamiliar cultural and funding systems. Missed opportunities and improvised proposals demonstrated that artistic practice could not, by itself, secure access to the institutions that commissioned, financed or presented cultural work. What was needed was an organisational framework through which practitioners could exchange knowledge, coordinate action and negotiate these systems collectively.

These efforts attracted the attention of international cultural funders and, in 2017, led to the initiative’s formal establishment in Berlin as Syria Cultural Index, a registered non-profit association. Its name reflected its first task: connecting Syrian cultural practitioners dispersed by war while creating a public resource through which their work could be encountered beyond the frame of displacement. Formalisation provided a legal basis for partnerships, funding and longer-term work. It also brought the organisation into direct contact with Germany’s legal, bureaucratic and financial architecture.

The path into institutional life was neither linear nor neutral. Administrative delays, banking restrictions linked to the organisation’s name and membership, and systemic discrimination repeatedly obstructed its operations. These were not incidental difficulties. They revealed how institutional procedures determine who can organise, whose work is trusted and under what conditions cultural participation becomes possible.

The adoption of the name coculture grew from this experience. It articulated a broader institutional horizon grounded in collective practice, shared authorship and cultural relations across borders, without stepping away from the organisation’s responsibility to artists and cultural practitioners connected to Syria.

Working initially from private spaces, coculture established a dedicated base in Berlin in 2018. Conceived as a civic and cultural environment shaped through use, it hosted exhibitions, workshops, residencies, performances, screenings and public conversations alongside informal meetings, peer support and collective care. The organisation’s work began to extend beyond the delivery of individual projects towards the slower tasks of maintaining a place, distributing responsibility and sustaining relationships over time.

Just as this physical and communal infrastructure began to stabilise, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed new constraints. coculture adapted its formats and continued to sustain artistic and intellectual exchange. The experience clarified a principle that would guide its development: cultural infrastructure resides not only in buildings and programmes, but also in the relationships, knowledge and organisational capacity that allow cultural work to continue through changing conditions.

The organisation’s original indexing impulse developed with it. Syria Cultural Index became TheIndex.Art, a digital infrastructure for mapping and documenting artists, artworks and cultural knowledge, beginning with Syrian modern and contemporary art. No longer the institution’s name, the index remained one of its defining practices: an archive, a connector and a means of understanding a cultural field across borders and generations.

This first chapter traces coculture’s passage from urgent coordination to institutional capacity. Experiments became working methods; obstacles became institutional knowledge; temporary arrangements became structures able to carry responsibility beyond a single project or moment. The conditions that called coculture into being have not disappeared. What has changed is its capacity to meet them—not through emergency response alone, but through sustained structures for producing, convening, documenting and organising. That capacity is the foundation of coculture’s next chapter.

Registering an organisation creates a legal body; it does not, by itself, create an institution. An institution takes shape when systems, structures, and authority are visible and accountable, and when responsibility endures beyond funding cycles, projects, teams and leadership changes.

The purpose of this work is not permanence for its own sake. coculture connects contemporary art with public memory, justice, artistic freedom and civic practice. Its institutional development gives durable form to collective agency: artists and cultural practitioners should participate in determining the narratives, systems and conditions through which their work enters public life.

coculture e.V. is a member-based German non-profit association. The General Assembly is the organisation’s highest statutory body, which elects the Board and decides on major institutional changes. The Board carries legal, fiduciary and strategic responsibility. The executive team develops and implements the artistic and operational work within defined mandates, while an external strategic and ethical advisory body contributes independent judgement without replacing statutory authority.

This architecture is not an administrative layer added to cultural work; it forms part of the conditions that make such work possible. Collective agency does not mean the absence of responsibility. It means widening participation while keeping decisions, duties and consequences legible. Institution-building therefore also takes place through contracts, budgets, employment structures, safeguarding, data governance, archives, intellectual property and records of decision-making.

Working across places requires more than maintaining a presence in several cities. Germany provides coculture with a legal and operational base, but it is not treated as the cultural centre. Syria is not approached as a source from which experience is extracted, while diasporic cities are not granted sole authority to interpret or validate it.

The measure of this chapter will not be coculture’s size, visibility or permanence for their own sake. It will be whether the institution can preserve cultural memory without fixing it into a single narrative and protect artistic freedom while remaining publicly accountable.