Carefully tended and beautifully unruled

Written by Natalie Giorgadze, General Director and Maya Weisinger, Head of Communications and Community Development, Culture Action Europe 

Open your browser and type in: www.cultureactioneurope.org 

Before any words appear, a garden will open up before you. 

Flowers, plants, trees, bushes, mushrooms and shrubs form a circle, woven together by a web of roots and mycelium. Insects, small animals and birds move through and above this landscape. 

Culture Action Europe chose a garden as a metaphor to represent our network, which Lulu Soto has brilliantly visualised. This ecosystemic image captures who we are: a mobilised community made up of many different actors – cultural organisations big and small, artists and cultural workers from different sectors, geographies, backgrounds and experiences. Like any garden, our network is in constant motion: growing, resting, rooting and seeding.  

This garden is based on the principles of permaculture: everyone has a role to play; everyone relies on others and helps others to thrive. The concept of “care” is our guiding principle. We embrace our differences and learn from one another, creating a space where we can belong together and where we can be many. Our shared values hold this ecosystem together: those of freedom, diversity, openness, curiosity and care. 

If “care” is our guiding principle, then “proximity” is our daily practice. Bold and unruly change does not happen at a safe distance. It requires intimacy. The kind that comes from listening closely and disagreeing honestly. The kind that shares time, space and vulnerability. We have to make room for closeness, even when (especially when!) our network stretches across borders, languages and vastly different realities. 

Looking ahead to 2026, we are deliberately shifting how and where we find proximity across our wonderful garden. The upcoming Satellite BEYOND gatherings across six different regions, invite us to meet where our neighbours are, to be shaped by local urgencies and imaginaries, and to practice care at a human scale. They are an intentional move closer. Closer to the kind of collective courage that only emerges when people share a room, a meal, a conversation that runs long. 

In a garden, relationships are not abstract. Roots touch. Mycelium carries signals of stress and nourishment. Growth depends on what happens underground, in the quiet, unseen work of connection. For a network/garden like ours, proximity is not only geographical; it is relational. It is built through trust, through showing up for one another, through creating conditions where togetherness can turn into mutual support, maybe even shared risk. 

This year, Culture Action Europe reached the milestone of 300 members. Behind this number stands a wonderfully colourful community – you: our members, partners (often also our partners-in-crime), friends and fellows, role models and sources of inspiration. As the year draws to a close, we are celebrating you, who make this garden what it is. Whether you are deeply rooted in one patch of this ecosystem or simply passing through for a brief encounter, like a pollinating bee or a fluttering butterfly, your presence leaves a trace in the living memory of our shared garden. 

The garden also changes from within. Our greatest superpower – the Culture Action Europe team – has grown. Flourished, even. As a team, we are deeply committed to its care. And yet, we give the garden space to rewild, to surprise us, to grow in the directions it chooses, and to fade from where it no longer needs tending. 

To quote Jazmín Beirak, Director General for Cultural Rights in Spain, “to govern culture is to create conditions for its ungovernability.” This applies to our garden metaphor as well. Our role as “care-ful gardeners” in this rich cultural ecosystem is, indeed, to create the conditions for this fertile ungovernability, to keep balancing between tending and wildness. To be “careful with each other, so that we can be dangerous together.”  

Thank you for growing this living, caring, beautifully unruly garden with us.