The return of care: a living culture takes hold

On why the concept of Care has re-emerged at the heart of festival practice – and why its timing is anything but accidental

In a time when ethical boundaries are increasingly blurred and normlessness is becoming normalised; when power suppresses compassion and the strong grow more merciless toward the vulnerable; when human ego continues to damage its own ecosystem; and when rational thinking is devalued and replaced by reactive, superficial responses – within such a fragile and imbalanced human landscape, the re-emergence and persistence of the concept of Care is hardly surprising. On the contrary, it appears as both an inevitable necessity and a natural response to the conditions of our time. The pandemic made this unmistakably clear to the entire world. As societies buckled under the weight of a shared crisis, a stark imbalance was exposed: the resources, strategies, and institutional imagination that humanity has long devoted to war stood in sharp contrast to what had been invested in health, solidarity, and collective well-being. The world had perfected the architecture of conflict but had no comparable blueprint for care – no equivalent mobilisation of will, funding, or foresight directed toward protecting the lives and inner lives of its people. That absence left a wound. And from that wound, a question: what kind of world do we actually want to build?

The pandemic also brought into focus something the cultural sector had long sensed, but society had never treated as truly urgent: the profound precariousness of those who work within it. Artists, festival workers, freelancers, producers – people who dedicate their lives to creating shared meaning – were among the first to lose their footing when the crisis struck. Their vulnerability was not new; it had simply been overlooked. When everything stopped, it became impossible to ignore. Some cultural institutions responded with more than emergency measures – they took lasting responsibility, developing projects that addressed this fragility as a structural problem rather than an occupational inevitability.

It is out of this growing recognition – that care for people and care for communities are inseparable concerns – that European initiatives such as CultureAndHealth and CARE-Culture for Mental Health have emerged. They reflect a cultural sector in the process of redefining itself: no longer seen solely as a field of production, but increasingly as an actor that assumes responsibility for collective well-being. The strong engagement with sessions on this topic at EFA's Arts Festivals Summits over the past three years, as well as the high level of interest in the retreat held in Varna, demonstrate that what individual festivals had each been doing in their own way – often quietly, often without a shared language – is beginning to converge into something larger: a collective thought and a collective will to act.

Similarly, the approaches developed by participants in the Halaqat project – implemented by the Goethe-Institut for festivals in the MENA region – show that this concern extends well beyond Europe. It has become a shared area of inquiry and exploration among cultural actors across different geographies.

Within this broader context, the work carried out over the past year by the Festivals Care! Working Group, established at the Edinburgh Summit in 2025, marks an important step toward embedding Care as a living culture among EFA festivals. Looking back, it seems that the culture has indeed taken hold.

I use the word "culture" deliberately in its biological sense, as in a starter culture. The formation and spread of cultural values can be likened to the fermentation of milk into kefir. New ideas, practices, and ways of thinking – emerging from thinkers, artists, and scientists – initially appear in small, contained environments. Over time, they are adopted, internalised, and begin to ferment within wider communities. Once this process begins, it gains its own momentum: the culture spreads organically, transforming its surroundings from within, just as a small amount of kefir culture transforms an entire body of milk.

The Festivals Care! Working Group was established precisely at this moment of convergence – when the need was clear, the will was present, and what remained was to build something together. Over the past year, the group has done exactly that. Beginning with the formation of a core group committed to shared reflection, it created a space where perspectives, personal experiences, and organisational realities could be brought into honest dialogue. From that dialogue emerged a common understanding that feels both simple and consequential: care must not be treated as a separate agenda item, a programme strand, or a box to be ticked. It must be woven into the fabric of how festivals are run – a horizontal principle embedded across governance, programming, working conditions, and community relations alike.

This understanding, in turn, has shaped the group's next step: a research process designed to map the diverse care practices already taking root across European festivals. Through a dedicated survey and the compilation of an EFFE Seal Catalogue focused on Arts, Health, and Well-being, the group is working to make the invisible visible – to surface and document what festivals and their host cities are already doing, often without naming it as care. The survey is not merely a data-collection exercise; it is itself an act of awareness-raising, an invitation for festivals to pause and recognise that the values they have long held may already constitute a practice worth naming, sharing, and building upon.

The dissemination of these findings will carry the work further still – serving as a form of advocacy that encourages festivals across Europe to move from instinct to intention, and from isolated practice to conscious, long-term commitment. What began as a wound left by a pandemic, and a question about what kind of world we want to build, is now taking the shape of an answer.

by Mahir Namur