The Warsaw Observatory of Culture at the Cultural Mobility Forum 2024 in Caernafron

Once a year, in addition to the Cultural Mobility Forum, a summit is held for all member organisations. This year’s event was co-organised by Wales Arts in Caernarfon, North Wales, and WOK was represented by Anna Galas-Kosil, who was also invited to chair a panel on Valuing International Cultural Collaboration.

The international dimension is crucial to the development of artists and cultural workers, enriching their individual careers or the strategies of the organisations in which they work. The theme of this year’s Forum was “Cultural Mobility beyond Internationalisation” and its main objective was to map the most prominent trends in international mobility and to provide a platform for debate on professional development at the international level. Many funding programmes and other initiatives in the cultural sector aim to internationalise careers, to export work beyond the borders of one’s own country. On the other hand, travel often seems to be a luxury for people from less affluent regions of the world, or a privilege when budgets for culture and international cooperation are subject to drastic cuts. International travel is also widely discussed in the cultural sector in the context of climate change and the carbon footprint it creates.

On the first day of the Forum, Anna Galas-Kosil spoke with Laura Ganza of the Belgian organisation Africalia and Sahra Filip, Deputy Director of the Delfina Foundation. Together they discussed how international relations can support artists’ voices in times of crisis and rising nationalism, and how we can increasingly see international contexts in local communities and settings through the combination of relations and migration.

Photo by Ffotograffiaeth Iolo Penri Photography