Salwa Gatherings

Bringing together the Salwa community to share and learn from each other.

Salwa is a platform that aims to diversify the cultural landscape by amplifying the many urgent and passionate voices of artists and makers who are new to the Netherlands. Prioritizing artists with migrant backgrounds, Salwa provides them with guidance, resources, and support so that they can sustain their creative practices and independently hone their craft and their style.
Salwa's 2022 program revolves around caring for artists who find themselves between multiple cultures. They are working to build an hospitable 'third space' infrastructure across the Netherlands. Shaped by shifting complex identities that are increasingly mediated across borders through the internet, artists with hybrid orientations often develop a distinctly unique cultural perspective that is attuned to the complexities of our times.

The Salwa Gatherings bring together artists that through their work and lived experience relate to collective care practices and community-building. The overarching theme of the Salwa Gatherings will center care practices. Considering that Salwa engages mostly with artists that have a refugee or migrant background and are part of larger diasporic communities, we understand care here as ways of gathering, listening, sharing, and reflecting, as a way to build and strengthen togetherness and community in a society that does not always provide the care infrastructures one needs. Working together with the artists in a collaborative manner where sustainability and resilience are key components, this program aims to establish long-lasting relationships where tools, wisdom and skills can be shared among each other, in conversation with the public that will be welcomed to actively engage.
Each Salwa Gathering will have their own sub-theme and will be site-specific. We want to think through the formation of our histories and narratives, and we want to navigate and experience these spaces that are situated within the past, present and future. Learning from nature, we take on an ecological perspective on embodied care and togetherness, whereby the Salwa Gatherings will be in sync with seasonal changes. Just as the non-human ecosystem surrounding us, we are intrinsically connected with and dependent on each other. Looking at the roots from where one can grow and the ways roots and fungi navigate their way (to each other) underneath the earth, creating their own alternative networks and ecosystems, we see soil as transformational, historical, and relational.