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In this issue, we first travel from Finland, where a museum is rethinking how it supports artists, then to France, where a significant step has been taken in addressing the legacies of colonial collecting, and to the UAE where the famous ‘Lucy’ travelled from Ethiopia to be shown at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi. In Colombia, efforts are underway to preserve Indigenous languages before they disappear, while in Switzerland, a newly appointed botanical curator invites us to pay closer attention to the natural world.
As we look ahead to World Listening Day on July 18, this edition reflects on the many ways we listen, not only by attuning ourselves to the sounds around us and within the natural environment, but also by remaining open to different perspectives, histories and cultures. Together, these stories remind us that listening is an act of both care and curiosity. It asks us to look beyond the familiar, engage with difference and stay attentive to the many forms of knowledge.
By listening more deeply to others, we often discover new ways of understanding ourselves. This transpires in our discussion with award-winning Lagos-based architect Tosin Oshinowo, who invites us to explore how listening to place and local knowledge can reshape the way we think about international collaboration.
And finally, we leave you for the summer with the inspiring reading recommendation of Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime.
Funding & creativity
FINLANDEMMA | Espoo Museum of Modern Art rethinking artist support
The Finnish museum EMMA is experimenting and is committed to supporting four artists with a relationship to the Nordic-Baltic region over the next several years in ways: acquiring their work, financially supporting external production, providing a part-time stipend for a year and covering health insurance for a year. In contrast to traditional one-off commissions, the initiative stands out for supporting mid-career artists in a more sustainable way, providing the time and multifaceted support needed to reflect the realities of artistic practice and foster a sustainable pipeline of creative talent. Artistic innovation often depends on economic security and it recognises that artistic careers require sustained support beyond project-based grants, addressing both financial stability and wellbeing. (Source: The Art Newspaper)
ITALY & INDIADayanita Singh and the rise of a new ‘friendship economy’
Presented alongside the Venice Biennale, photographer Dayanita Singh’s ARCHIVIO demonstrated an alternative production model rooted in friendship. Staged at the State Archives of Venice without major commercial backing, the project operated through what Singh called a “friendship economy”. While shipping was funded by her India-based institutional partner, she managed to have support from individuals along the way, relationships cultivated over decades. On her website, this form of patronage is based on care and reciprocity rather than the economical.
The exhibition stressed archives as living, evolving entities rather than fixed repositories, and will travel to museums in Rome, Turin, and New Delhi with adaptations. (Source: Hyperallergic)
UK & NIGERIAClosure of Tiwani Contemporary: a turning point for the African Art market?
Tiwani Contemporary, which specialises in artists from Africa and the diaspora, was established in 2011. The gallery's London space closed last May and the Lagos gallery, which opened in 2022, will also stop operating in its current form in August as the business restructures. Its closure has prompted concerns and wider reflection on the fragility of the market for African art, particularly at a time of commercial caution and broader economic slowdown affecting gallery viability. It also raises questions: whether recent global interest in African art is a lasting shift or a fleeting trend, what comes next and is it just part of an industry undergoing change? (Source: The Art Newspaper)
ZIMBABWE, BOTSWANA & ZAMBIABetween home and the global stage
Several Southern African artists have built their careers abroad before exhibiting at home. This is partly because of limited funding, a small collector base and lack of art infrastructure. For many, mobility has been a necessity rather than a choice. Reflecting on his journey from Zimbabwe to Cape Town seeking “access to the artistic epicentre of southern Africa”, Ronald Muchatuta whose works explore displacement and the relationship between exiles and migrants noted, “My growth was in constant battle with being contextualised from my place of origin.” The article concluded with a sense of hope, noting regional support is slowly improving. (Source: Ocula)
Cultural Policy & Cultural Diplomacy
ETHIOPIA & UAEFrom Ethiopia to Abu Dhabi: Lucy shared through collaboration
Unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, Lucy, the famous 3.2-million-year-old hominin, transformed our understanding of human evolution by showing that upright walking developed before the expansion of the human brain. Rarely displayed outside Ethiopia in the last 20 years, Lucy is now on view at the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi through partnership between Ethiopian and Emirati institutions built on shared expertise, care and respect. As the article noted, increasingly African nations are shaping how their cultural and scientific heritage is preserved, interpreted and shared with the world. Lucy’s presence in Abu Dhabi embodies this change. (Source: The Conversation)
FRANCEFrance’s restitution law: A historic step
In May 2026, France’s Parliament passed a landmark law simplifying the restitution of artworks looted during the colonial era, between 1815 and 1972. The legislation partially fulfills President Macron’s 2017 promise to return African cultural heritage to the continent, with the hope of strengthening diplomatic ties with former colonies. The law’s main achievement is procedural: it introduces an exception to the principle of inalienability of public collections, recognising the cultural significance of these objects beyond their diplomatic value.
Beyond logistics, restitution is now seen as an act of sovereignty and a recognition of a shared colonial past. It also opens the way for new forms of cultural cooperation, including shared exhibitions and artist residency programmes. (Source: The New York Times)
Against this backdrop, an article written by legal expert Julien Anfruns situated France’s new restitution framework as a significant, if still evolving, step towards addressing colonial-era dispossession through law. It warned that its capacity to deliver on this ambition would depend less on principle alone than on whether the necessary legal, administrative and diplomatic means were fully mobilised to turn intent into meaningful practice. (Source: Le Club des Juristes)
FRANCE & THAILANDFashion as Diplomacy: Royal Thai dress at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs
Currently on show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris until November, La Mode en Majesté explores the evolution of Thai royal dress from traditional craftsmanship to contemporary fashion. The exhibition highlights the dialogue between Thai heritage and French haute couture through Queen Sirikit’s collaboration with Pierre Balmain, using fashion as a diplomatic tool to present Thailand to the world. The exhibition presents how the royal family has shaped cultural diplomacy, national identity and international exchange. (Source: Costume Society)
ITALY AI transparency, design governance and policy implications from Milan Design Week
Should design fairs ask for disclosure when AI tools are used in the creation of exhibited work? Reflecting on Milan Design Week, the writer suggested AI transparency to maintain trust in creative environments. AI poses challenges for authorship, creators' rights and cultural diversity. As AI becomes embedded in design practice, the article called for design fairs to be responsible such as to have clear policies on disclosure, authorship and for evaluation. This is not about whether AI should be embraced or rejected but ensuring audiences understand how work has been created and that creative industry events should be places where human creativity remains the default expectation. (Source: Dezeen)
SWITZERLAND & UGANDA Visa denials highlight questions of access in global cultural exchange
At Africa Basel, which was held alongside Art Basel, the Umoja Art Gallery’s stand was empty. Its staff were denied Swiss visas shortly before the fair, despite a two-month application process requiring travel to Nairobi from Kampala. Works that the staff intended to bring, including pieces by Congo-born, Uganda-based artist Makano, were in transit.
It highlighted the physical barriers faced by some African cultural practitioners. The gallery noted that while artistic exchange depends on the movement of people, ideas and cultures, not everyone enjoys the same freedom to participate. (Source: ARTnews)
Cultural Hotspots to Watch
CHINAShenzhen’s cultural shift: inside Tencent-backed Róng Museum
The Róng Museum of Art, designed by Ole Scheeren, opens in Shenzhen next year as part of a mixed-use campus linked to Tencent’s founder. It reflects the city’s rapid growth, where cultural infrastructure is increasingly tied to residential and corporate development. Scheeren’s design lifts gallery spaces above ground, creating an open public area below that blurs the line between museum and city. The project signals a broader shift in Shenzhen, where architecture, capital and civic space converge to shape new forms of cultural exchange. (Source: Dezeen)
For more on the overall museum landscape in China, here is an insightful review from The Conversation titled A new museum every 1.5 days: what’s driving China’s massive cultural expansion.
UAEAbu Dhabi advances cultural vision with new performance venue
A new performing arts centre, Dar Al Funoon Abu Dhabi, is planned to open next to Saadiyat Cultural District in 2030. Designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry and viewed as one of his final major architectural works, the centre will add to Abu Dhabi’s cultural offerings. Inspired by the rhythms of the local landscape and the movement of wind and water, the venue will host opera, ballet, theatre, orchestral concerts, musicals, festivals, cultural events and intimate performances. Bringing together leading artists, companies and creative talent from the UAE, the region and beyond, it reflects Abu Dhabi’s continued investment in cultural infrastructure and its ambition to strengthen its position as a global arts and culture hub. (Source: The National)
USBoston’s Latino Community Opens New Arts Centre
The grassroots organisation Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA) was founded in 1968 to help displaced Puerto Rican families secure affordable housing amid urban renewal and displacement in Boston. Over time, it has grown and now became La CASA: The Center for the Arts, Self-determination and Activism. The $33 million project is rooted in community and culture. The building brings together past and present, blending brick and terra cotta that reflect the richness of Latin Caribbean heritage with the character of Boston’s 19th-century architecture. La CASA illustrates how cultural institutions grow from community needs rather than top-down approaches. (Source: The Art Newspaper)
Transmission, Heritage & Crafts
ARAB & CANADAToronto Museum acquires major Arab heritage collection
The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto acquired the Widad Kawar Collection of Arab Dress and Heritage Arts, comprising nearly 600 garments, historic objects and everyday accessories from the Levant region (Jordan, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon) as well as other Arab countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the UAE and Yemen. The collection was gathered over decades by Palestinian textile historian Widad Kawar, who is based in Amman, Jordan, and has dedicated much of her life to collecting, studying and exhibiting Arab dress and heritage. It becomes the largest public collection of Arab dress in North America and provides Toronto’s large Arab diaspora, particularly younger generations, a meaningful connection to their heritage and shared histories. (Source: Royal Ontario Museum)
QATAR, SAUDI ARABIA, SYRIA, UAE Arab voices take centre stage at the 2026 Venice Biennale
The 2026 Venice Biennale sees an impressive range of Arab national pavilions exploring themes of heritage, memory, identity and collective futures. From Saudi Arabia’s celebration of endangered craft traditions and Syria’s poignant reflection on cultural loss and restitution, to the UAE’s exploration of sound as a carrier of memory and Qatar’s focus on migration and exchange, the exhibitions demonstrate the region’s growing confidence and diversity on the global contemporary art stage. Together, the pavilions highlight how artists are drawing on local histories and traditions to address universal questions of belonging, resilience and cultural continuity. (Source: Vogue Arabia)
COLOMBIASafeguarding the native languages
With more than 130 hours of recordings and a robust catalogue of chants, life testimonies and traditional stories, the new Repository of Native Languages of Colombia is establishing itself as a key virtual platform for safeguarding the linguistic heritage of the country’s indigenous peoples. In a territory that recognises 65 indigenous languages, two Creole languages and Romani, this digital archive emerges as an urgent response to a troubling reality: according to UNESCO, a language disappears somewhere in the world every two weeks. This represents an irreparable loss for humanity’s memory, accelerated here by armed conflict, urban displacement, and discrimination. (Source: Lenguas nativas de Colombia)
GERMANY & AMAZONShifting perspectives on the Amazon through Indigenous worldviews
Amazônia. Indigenous Worlds (running until August 9) brings together nearly 400 works, crafts, and objects at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, through which the German institution proposes an approach to the Amazon region from the perspective of its indigenous peoples. Curated by anthropologist Leandro Varison and artist Denilson Baniwa, the exhibition seeks to move away from visions that reduce the Amazon to a natural or exotic space, presenting it instead as a complex cultural and social territory: dynamic, diverse, and in permanent transformation. (Source: Arte Al Dia)
TAIWAN & UKTranslation as creative collaboration
Translators actively shape how stories travel across languages and cultures. The International Booker Prize-winning Taiwan Travelogue has drawn attention not only to its author Yeung Shuang-zi but also to translator Lin King. The Prize splits its £50,000 award equally between author and translator, a recognition that the translated work is a collaboration, not a copy. (Source: Times Now)
The novel itself embodies linguistic complexity. Although written in Mandarin Chinese, it deliberately presents itself as a Japanese text, requiring Lin King to navigate multiple languages, cultural references and layers of meaning. In her acceptance speech, King challenged the idea that translators should remain invisible, arguing instead for a translation that embraces complexity and makes the process of mediation visible to readers.
Discussions comparing its English, Japanese, and Korean editions highlighted how each version generates new interpretations while remaining faithful to the original text, illustrating how stories continue to evolve as they travel. (Source: The Reporter)
Togetherness
CANADA, MEXICO and US Art and football crossover
It’s the World Cup. More than a sports event, the FIFA World Cup is an exciting time to bring people together. Beyond the stadiums, museums and galleries across the three host nations, including Mexico City’s Museo Jumex and Miami’s Pérez Art Museum, presented football-themed exhibitions that explored the links between football, art and history. Cultural programmes surrounding the World Cup demonstrate how major sporting events serve as platforms for community participation and help to break down political and cultural barriers. People may not share the same backgrounds or perspectives but during moments like these, common experiences can create connections. (Source: The Art Newspaper)
SWITZERLANDA New Ecological Ethos: the creation of the Botanical Curator position
The Swiss museum near Basel, Fondation Beyeler appointed Rahel Kesselring as its first “botanical curator”. The appointment suggests art institutions are treating ecological knowledge not as a programming theme but as a curatorial framework that shapes institutional thinking. By placing nonhuman life at the centre of the museum’s thinking, Kesselring aims to cultivate ecological literacy from the ground up, starting with what can be touched, observed, and cared for, an approach that recalibrates our relationship with nature and challenges traditional museum boundaries. At the same time, she cautioned against overly romantic views of nature, arguing that discussions of plants and ecology are often “too eager to claim the good side, skipping over the ambivalence and friction that shape real human-plant relations.” (Source: The Art Newspaper)
On a related note, London’s Serpentine Galleries named the Italian design studio Formafantasma “Lead R&D Fellows, Ecology”. (Source: Wallpaper*)
SINGAPORE,THE NETHERLANDS & CHINA Asia-Europe Cultural Festival fosters artistic exchange
AECFest 2026 was a multidisciplinary festival that took place across three locations Hong Kong, Utrecht and Singapore from April to June, exploring the themes of presence, perception and belonging. Connecting artists from 19 countries across Asia and Europe through contemporary dance, theatre, film and multidisciplinary performance, the festival invited audiences to reflect on shared experiences and common questions in an increasingly volatile and divided world. Its Residency Programme stretches across the year, allowing ideas, practices and relationships to develop over time. Read an artist interview here from Asia-Europe Cultural Festival.
UAEArt as a reflection in uncertain times
The UAE art community has called upon artists to respond to the current period of regional instability through creative practice, recognising art’s role in documenting, processing, and reflecting the complexities of contemporary history. Juma Al Haj’s exhibition stands among one of the first in the UAE to engage with these recent events, translating the psychological impact of conflict and uncertainty into a visual language that navigates the tension between order and chaos. Through his work, personal experience becomes a lens through which broader collective anxieties are explored, demonstrating how art can serve both as a record of the present moment and a space for reflection during these times. (Source: The National)
UKRoots and Routes: why the history of Britain is a history of movement
Ancient DNA from Roman and medieval Britain points to a far more fluid past than traditional narratives suggest, shaped by continuous movement, mixing and adaptation rather than fixed peoples or eras. The Roman occupation and Norman Conquest left relatively limited genetic impact, while early medieval migrations from across the North Sea had a far more lasting effect. Britain thus emerges as a crossroads where identities were repeatedly reshaped through contact and migration, underscoring migration as a defining and enduring force in its history. (Source: The Conversation)
THE GLOBAL POWER OF THE LOCAL: A CONVERSATION WITH TOSIN OSHINOWO
Portrait written by Anaïs Aguerre, Founder and Director of Culture Connect
I first met Tosin Oshinowo in 2022. I was curating the programme for Culture Summit Abu Dhabi under the theme “A Matter of Time: How can culture change the world’s tempo?”, a framework that had led me deep into questions of progress, sustainability and the assumptions that underpin our understanding of modernity. At the same moment, Tosin was curating the Sharjah Architecture Triennial under the title “The Beauty of Impermanence”.
What began as a practical conversation about inviting her as a speaker in Abu Dhabi quickly became something else. It felt like a meeting of minds. Many of the ideas that had occupied months of reading and reflection suddenly found another language through architecture. We spoke about scarcity not as failure but as a source of ingenuity, about moderation as intelligence rather than sacrifice, about forms of knowledge that modernity had pushed aside in its pursuit of efficiency and endless growth. Above all, Tosin questioned something I had rarely heard articulated so clearly: rather than asking how African architecture could fit within a global narrative of modernity, perhaps it was the narrative itself that needed to change.
That conversation stayed with me long after we hung up. It became clear that Tosin was not simply designing buildings: she was quietly dismantling some of the assumptions through which we have come to understand progress itself. Ideas that are often presented today as new responses to global challenges such as adaptability, moderation, collective knowledge or making more with less, have existed in many societies for generations. Perhaps, she suggested, what needs changing is not these practices but the way we value them. This portrait, and the conversation on which it is based, are in many ways a continuation of that first exchange.
Today, Tosin is recognised as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary architecture and design. As founder and principal of Oshinowo Studio, her award-winning practice has delivered civic, commercial and residential projects that combine rigorous contemporary architecture with a profound understanding of place from Maryland Mall in Lagos to coastal homes, urban infrastructure and, most recently, a new community developed with the United Nations Development Programme for people displaced by Boko Haram in north-east Nigeria. Before establishing her own studio in 2013, she worked with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in London and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam, contributing to the Fourth Mainland Bridge proposal before returning to Nigeria to help shape major national projects. Alongside architecture, she has also become an internationally recognised furniture designer through Ilé-Ilà, her collection of handcrafted chairs that has brought contemporary African design to audiences around the world.
As significant as this trajectory is, it is not, in my view, what makes her work so distinctive.
Tosin has lived and worked across Lagos, London, Rotterdam, Boston and Sharjah. What distinguishes her is not simply the breadth of that journey, but the way she thinks across worlds. Her practice demonstrates that globality does not require cultural dilution. Quite the opposite. The more internationally she works, the more convinced she becomes that every place deserves to speak in its own voice.
“I never left Lagos in my mind,” she told me.
It is a simple sentence, but it carries a precise way of being in the world: movement without dislocation, exposure without erasure.
Her early years in Lagos were shaped by protection as much as by place. Movement was restricted, the city experienced through carefully controlled routes. Later, arriving in the UK as a teenager, the contrast was immediate. Not because one place was more real than the other, but because neither could be assumed to be self-explanatory. Architecture, when she first encountered it academically, did not resolve this tension. It intensified it. The canon she was taught was far removed from the environments she knew, and the gap between lived space and represented space became impossible to ignore.
“I felt like I was being taught to write with the wrong hand.”
A sort of misalignment.
What followed was not a search for alternatives, but a search for grounding. At University College London (UCL), and later during long hours spent reading at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), she began to encounter other ways of understanding cities, particularly those that had been described as peripheral, informal or incomplete. The more she read, the more inadequate those labels began to feel.
A turning point came when she encountered Rem Koolhaas’ work on Lagos. Not because it defined the city from the outside, but because it acknowledged that Lagos already produced its own forms of logic, intensity and organisation. For Tosin, it was less a discovery than a recognition. A reminder that proximity can sometimes obscure what distance reveals.
From there, her work takes a clear but quiet shift. The question is no longer how to represent identity, but how to understand the systems that already carry it. She is careful here. Identity, for her, is not something to be retrieved intact from the past. Nor is it something to be dissolved into global sameness. It is something that persists through use, through how people organise space, privacy, movement and care.
In Yoruba spatial culture, she explains, certain arrangements are non-negotiable: thresholds are layered, domestic spaces are screened, the relationship between public and private is carefully staged. These are not stylistic choices. They are inherited logics of coexistence.
This is where her thinking becomes quietly radical. What is often described as “informal” is, in her view, not an absence but a continuation, systems that operate outside formal recognition but are fully functional, historically grounded and often more adaptive than the structures that claim to replace them.
Urban markets in West Africa, which she has been researching extensively in the context of her Harvard’s Loeb Fellowship, are one such example. They are frequently framed as informal economies, yet this misses their depth. They are descendants of older trade networks (Saharan routes, coastal exchanges, precolonial systems of circulation) that have evolved rather than disappeared.
“What looks marginal from one perspective appears infrastructural from another,” she reflects.
This shift in perspective is central to how Tosin understands international work. For her, it is not about moving expertise from one place to another. It is about noticing how knowledge changes under different conditions. She resists the idea that any one context can be treated as the default.
“I never set out consciously to operate in an international space... I’m actually very interested in mastering the local,” she continues.
At a time when international success is often measured by scale, expansion and replication, Tosin argues for something slower and more demanding: an intimate understanding of context.
True collaboration, she insists, only happens when no one arrives as the sole bearer of knowledge. Not equal in output, perhaps, but equal in the right to define what matters.
A project she developed with a French practice on a tech campus in Nigeria made this tangible. It was not about applying external expertise to a local context but about building something neither side could produce alone: climatic intelligence, construction scale and spatial habits in negotiation rather than hierarchy.
Another project in Freetown, a monument commemorating carriers and layered histories of conflict and survival, extended this even further. The question was not simply how to represent memory but how to create a space that could hold multiple forms of belonging at once.
What runs through all of this is a resistance to simplification.
Tosin does not treat multiplicity as an abstract ideal. She works with it as a condition already present in the world, one that many systems are still struggling to recognise. In a context that so often rewards clarity through reduction, her practice moves in the other direction: towards complexity that is allowed to remain open, unresolved and alive a little longer.
“I want my grandchildren to grow up in a world where it is okay to be different.”
It was not said as a grand vision of the future but as a measure of the present. Perhaps this is what makes her work feel so necessary right now. It does not propose a new global style or a universal language. It asks something more grounded: what if we stopped assuming the world needs to be made legible in only one way?
And what if international work was not about moving between separate worlds but about recognising that we have always been inhabiting the same one - together, but differently - shaped by geography, climate, memory and constraint? The question is not simply how different contexts can be connected, but how they can learn from one another.
Seen this way, diversity is not an aesthetic position or a contemporary value to be added on. It is simply how the world responds to itself: to heat and rain, to scarcity and abundance, to settlement and movement. The ways we build, organise and inhabit space are not deviations from a norm, but evidence of adaptation.
Tosin Oshinowo’s work returns us to this point with quiet insistence: that thinking across worlds is not about bridging distance, but about learning to recognise a shared inhabitation that has always been there: uneven, complex and already in motion.
Our quick-fire round
1. When did ‘international’ first enter your life? Did you know then it would stick?
I always knew there was another world. When I was very young, we moved from Lagos to the UK for a period while my father was studying, before returning when I was about six. I was old enough to notice that the place I was coming from and the place I was going to were different.
One early memory stays with me. We had just arrived back in Lagos, it was early evening, and suddenly the power went out. My sister and I panicked, and everyone laughed and said, “Oh, NEPA (*National Electric Power Authority) has taken the light.” It was the first time I understood that what felt like a shock to us was simply normal here. That difference became part of everyday life.
I was aware of these shifts very early on, but I didn’t yet have the language to describe them. It was really much later, during my studies at UCL, that I began to understand them in a more structured way.
2. What’s the secret to a great international collaboration, and what do people gain from it?
The most important thing is that people do not bring the same thing. A good collaboration happens when each party brings something distinct and valuable, and when there is a shared commitment to excellence in what each contributes.
The real value of international collaboration is that it allows you to understand a context you would not otherwise have access to. Every place can be understood, but only if you learn how to see it with the right frame. Collaboration creates a kind of safe space for that learning to happen.
3. Which projects best capture your international work? What’s next?
Perhaps the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, because it challenged me deeply. I came in with a very specific way of understanding the world shaped by my own context, and I had to learn another one entirely. I had lived in Europe and Nigeria, but I had very limited exposure to the Middle East at that point. Sharjah required me to understand its history, its governance and its particular trajectory of development. That process expanded how I think, but also how I think about where I come from.
More recently, I’ve been working with a French practice on a tech campus in Nigeria. That collaboration has been interesting precisely because we brought different strengths: they had experience in large-scale delivery, while we brought an understanding of climate, culture and everyday spatial behaviour. The outcome has been something neither of us could have produced alone.
Another current project is a monument in Freetown, which will open soon. It commemorates carriers and layered histories of conflict and survival. The challenge there was how to hold multiple forms of belonging within one space. Glass became the answer: transparent, fragile, collective, never singular.
4. How do you see international collaboration evolving in today’s complex world?
Collaboration only really works when it is between equals. Too often, international projects still operate within hierarchies, where one side arrives as the “expert” and the other is positioned as implementer. That is not collaboration.
True collaboration requires both equality of voice and equality of tools. That also depends on systems and policy. In some contexts, governments have actively shaped frameworks that ensure knowledge transfer and balance between local and international partners. Without that intentionality, inequality tends to reproduce itself.
At its best, collaboration is not about one place teaching another but about building something that could not exist without both.
5. Is there a work of art, song, performance or film that captures the essence of cultural exchange for you?
City of God had a strong impact on me. It is a film that makes a very specific place feel completely alive and legible, even if you have never been there. What stayed with me is how it shows that a story does not need to be generalised to be understood. It can remain deeply rooted and still speak widely.
6. One book you’d press into someone’s hands to spark their curiosity about the world?
Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to Climate Change. It is a very powerful book because it shows how diverse the world has always been, and how much that diversity has been flattened over time by dominant systems of thinking.
What struck me most is that it invites you to reconsider where value lies. For me, it reinforced the sense that many ways of doing things that have been marginalised still hold deep relevance today.
Our Reading Recommendation
Recent extreme heatwaves have made it undeniable: hot summers are the new normal, and the climate emergency is here. To take a moment to pause and help make sense of this moment, we recommend Bruno Latour’s 2017 book, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime.
The late French sociologist, anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, known for his influential research on the philosophy of science is clear to show that the climate crisis is not an isolated environmental issue but a political one. The book offers a compelling framework for understanding the political realities of the climate crisis and argues there needs to be new ways of living together on a changing planet. One key part of the book is that Latour dismantles and dissects the dichotomy between the “Local” and the “Global” and introduces the “Terrestrial,” which seeks to establish a “third way” through the reorientation and negotiation of both spheres.
Training opportunity
Join our CPD-certified half-day training Bridging Worlds: Skills for Managing International Projects. The next available sessions will be held on
25 September 2026 (8:00 - 12:00 BST)
2 October 2026 (14:00 - 18:00 BST)
Gain practical tools and key skills for managing international cultural projects in today’s interconnected landscape. Delivered by Culture Connect, the course draws on our global experience to support professionals working across borders. Find out more on our website.
Hi! I really enjoyed your thoughts on cultural exchange and the importance of being open to different perspectives, histories, and cultures. I recently wrote “We All See Life Differently for a Reason,” exploring a similar idea from my own perspective. I’d love to hear your thoughts! 😊