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coculture is a berlin-based organisation dedicated to building artistic and cultural infrastructures in contexts shaped by conflict, displacement, and systemic inequality. We work at the intersection of contemporary art, community practice, and cultural governance, using artistic processes as tools for collective imagination and social repair.
Our mission is to support artists, cultural workers, and communities, particularly those affected by war, exile, and political violence, by creating platforms, institutions, and shared spaces that enable long-term cultural participation, professional agency, and mutual care. We believe culture is not a service to be delivered, but a collective practice through which societies negotiate memory, justice, and the future.
Through exhibitions, festivals, public programmes, and community-led initiatives, coculture fosters translocal dialogue and builds bridges between local and diasporic contexts. We commit to ethical governance, artistic autonomy, and independence from political or donor-driven agendas, ensuring our work remains accountable to the communities we serve.
coculture understands art as a civic act: a means to confront erasure, resist simplification, and rehearse more just ways of living together.
All our activities and projects reflect the following beliefs:
Inclusivity: The organization values and actively promotes inclusivity, ensuring that diverse voices and perspectives are represented and valued.
Equity: It recognizes and actively addresses historical and systemic inequalities, ensuring all individuals and communities have equal access to resources and opportunities.
Creativity: The organization values and fosters creativity, pushing boundaries and encouraging innovative thinking.
Collaboration: It believes in the power of collective action and works cooperatively with artists, other cultural organizations, and the wider community to achieve shared goals.
Integrity: The organization commits to acting ethically and responsibly, maintaining transparency and accountability in all its actions.
Respect: It respects all cultures, viewpoints, and expressions, treating all individuals with dignity and respect.
Sustainability: The organization is committed to sustainable practices and promoting environmental consciousness through its work.
Empowerment: It aims to empower artists, communities, and individuals, providing opportunities for growth, expression, and realizing their potential.
Courage: It is unafraid to challenge the status quo, confront injustice, and take risks in pursuing a more equitable and inclusive world.
Global Awareness: The organization appreciates and seeks to understand the interconnections and interdependencies of the world’s cultures and societies.
Passing the learning curve and establishing the organisation
From Necessity to Structure: coculture’s first chapter
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.
