Today, the challenges we face – here, in our region, and globally – seem more clearly connected than ever before. A water shortage is as much a scientific issue as it is a social or governance concern. With that awareness comes a common conception: that solving these problems demands a pooling of expertise from the social and hard sciences and beyond. Yet even within this perspective, there is not always room for artists and cultural practitioners to join the table of co-thinking and co-creation.

What can imagination and cultural practice contribute to understanding and transforming these entwined realities? And what might it look like to bring artists into the constellation of thinkers and actors striving to address our most pressing global challenges? By foregrounding the creativity central to cultural practice, would we gain new insight into our problems and the pathways toward solutions?

Ecologies of Culture — a new, four-year program co-funded by the European Union and led by the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC, in partnership with Oxfam, Megaphone, and Echos Electrik — invites applicants from inside and outside artistic practice to answer this question.

The program is aimed at finding ways to address the many challenges we face — from gender inequality and climate change to digital transformation and beyond — not as isolated issues but as an “ecology” of interconnected, reinforcing dynamics that produce the worlds we inhabit.

While thinking about the program, we tried to imagine what the cultures that populate the region — transnationally, nationally and hyperlocally — might look like as a reef extending out as far as an eye can see. One always knows the reef is “down there,” but until we dive into a specific corner, we cannot know what is happening in the diverse, fast-changing worlds beneath the surface. How does a current give life? How does the pollution from a new hotel in a coastal city endanger it? What about fast warming waters? When reef-building plankton migrate to cooler waters, do they bring memories of warming?

Ecology encompasses the networks of relationships: with place, memory, technology, land, language, and community. It is dense with activity, fragile but regenerative, shaped by what moves through it and what threatens it. To understand it then, one must look closely and locally.

At the core of the Ecologies of Culture program are a series of questions: How does culture help us better picture what is happening to our worlds, in these unknown reefs? Can it help us create new worlds? Can it be a place of coming together of scientists, journalists, anthropologists, artists, agronomists to think through this new connectivity? Can culture be reimagined as an ecology? And crucially, how can the worlds we create, the works we create stay in motion — between places, languages, and people — even when the routes between us are blocked or shrinking?

Today, we are asking you to dive down into this metaphor, to imagine, share, foster anew, and support with us the diverse forces, actors, interactions that structure the coral of culture that is our region.

Ecologies of Culture will support up to 58 projects across Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia