6. Celebrating 30 Years of the Evens Foundation

On 28 June 2022, after two years of delays due to Covid-19, the Evens Foundation celebrated three decades of projects, partnerships and prizes with a very special all-day event at Bozar in Brussels.

With Europe in an unprecedented moment of change, and war on its borders, the Foundation chose to celebrate its anniversary by looking forward to the future as well as taking a critical look at where we are today and honouring its achievements of the past.

The team created a programme that brought together leading voices from across the social, political and creative spectrum and the Evens Foundation network. This programme was framed by one question: how can we contribute to creating a better world, a world where we can truly live together in the face of unprecedented pressures?

Hosted by presenter and journalist Bahram Sadeghi, the programme was supported by a collection of media, a new animation introducing its work, a mini-documentary about its history, and a series of short films about its recent prize laureates.

After a day of debate, discussion and dance, the evening was a pure celebration with a walking dinner and dancing. Music was provided by DJ NiXie and a performance by the incredible Taraf de Caliu – a band formed by the founding members of Taraf de Haidouks, world famous for its energetic performances that preserve and elevate the traditional sounds of Southern Romania.

Tipping Points

We are experiencing a period of accelerated change – technological, environmental and social – and it is unlikely to slow down. Pandemics, migration, ethical shifts and the so-called ‘culture wars’ are just some of the resulting global challenges. Europe is reaching multiple tipping points. With the impact of Brexit still being widely felt, a violent invasion with a fallout we cannot predict, the rise of extremist political groups and a steady increase in significant climate ‘events’, we must consider what values we want to embody and fight for as Europeans.

“Revisiting our work from the past 30 years gives us many reasons to remain optimistic. We have been encouraged by acts of solidarity and grassroots movements in education, the arts and journalism. By the community groups and volunteers, passionate partners and organisations that give voices to those who need them most and hold those in power to account. By the pioneering research, unique creativity and inspiring initiatives that we have been privileged to support. Our archives are a small window into the best of Europe: a place of generosity, openness and hope. “So this year at the Evens Foundation, we are setting ourselves the task of going back to the fundamentals, to ask how we can continue to effect positive change in a world in such an extreme state of flux. To work out how to ‘tip’ in the right direction.

“Today, we will celebrate with you, but we will also ask challenging questions. What values are essential for tomorrow? How do we reach the disillusioned and disenfranchised – the people who have been failed by the systems and politics of the past – and work with them to realise a better, more equitable future? What should it mean to be European?”

Text by the Evens Foundation team on the occasion of the Foundation’s 30th Anniversary

Programme

The Seventh Value

The Seventh Value is a six-episode podcast produced by the Evens Foundation and Are We Europe, exploring six key values underpinning the European Project with think-tanks and research groups. The series interrogates the role of those values in contemporary Europe and invites participants to suggest a “seventh value” to add.

The first element of the Foundation’s 30th-anniversary event programme was a live debate around the issues raised by the podcast, featuring a number of the protagonists of the series and key partners: Carina Lopes (Digital Future Society), Maciej Nowicki (Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights & WATCH DOCS International Film Festival), Steven Stegers (EuroClio), and Maïté de Haan (Troebel vzw). The debate was hosted by Are We Europe’s deputy editor Juli Simond, who was also the host of the podcast.

Audience members were asked to participate through a live voting system and were also invited to add their own “seventh value” with small cards provided. The results were collated and shared on social media as part of the campaign supporting the podcast.

Evens Foundation Animation and Publication

To mark the occasion, the Foundation worked on two special projects: a new publication about its work over the past three decades and its vision for the future, and a short animation introducing the Foundation’s approach. The animation – produced in collaboration with Brussles-based studio Squarefish – debuted at the event before being launched on YouTube. The book was published via the online platform ISSUU live during the event and was accessed via interactive screens. A new version will be published in 2023.

Being Together: An Experiment with Atelier Leon –Participatory Performance/Experiment

In the afternoon, the audience was invited to join Atelier Leon, choreographer Seppe Baeyens, percussionist Saif AlQuaissy and residents of Zonnelied – a centre for people with disabilities – for an interactive dance workshop.

Together, the attendees of the event explored different forms of self-expression and connection, such as intimate oneto-one meetings, ‘flocking’ together like birds or battling one another in groups. The workshop encouraged guests to create new connections with each other, cutting through organisational hierarchies and cultural or social differences, using movement instead of words.

Stefan Zweig Fellowships Launch

Later in the day, the Foundation premiered a short documentarystyle film about its history. Among those included was Raymond Georis, a widely respected European philanthropist and longstanding friend of the Foundation.

Georis then took to the stage with the Foundation’s outgoing Chairwoman Monique Canto-Sperber to launch the Stefan Zweig Fellowships – a new initiative that was further developed over the course of 2022.

Conceived by the co-founder Corinne Evens, board members and friends of the Foundation, the initiative aims to support the next generation of bright minds and pioneering thinkers in Europe. It targets young post-graduates who are working around some of the key challenges facing contemporary Europe, primarily through financial support and academic partnerships.

The initiative is named after Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer Stefan Zweig. “Stefan Zweig was one of the few writers who had a clear idea of the dangers that threatened Europe,” explained Georis. “Stefan Zweig considers Europe from a humanist point of view, the point of view of culture and peace. He advocates a unification of our continent based on civil society in order to develop a sense of belonging among European citizens and thus counter the rise of nationalism.”

Laureates Ceremony

Bringing together the Foundation’s diverse network was also a celebratory moment. As many of the Foundation’s prize laureates had not been able to enjoy an awarding ceremony due to the restrictions imposed by Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, the Foundation organised a special ceremony for all four prizes and their laureates.

Each laureate was featured in a short film, created by the Foundation’s team with independent director Miguel Santa Clara and filming teams in six different countries.

The president of each jury introduced their work and invited them to the stage to say a few words, before receiving their award diploma and a jewelled loupe, designed by Goralska.

Headline debate – Europe: The End of the Affair?

To round off the programme, the team brought together three prominent thinkers and activists from various social, cultural and political spheres to discuss the historical legacies and contemporary challenges of Europe’s communities. Can we repair the relationships that are threatening to tear it apart?

The speakers were Zdenka Badovinac, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb; Lorenzo Marsili, philosopher, writer, and founder of transnational political NGO European Alternatives and cultural institution

Fondaziona Studio Rizoma; and Johny Pitts, writer, photographer and journalist, curator of award-winning online journal Afropean.com and ENAR. The discussion was moderated by Bahram Sadeghi.

The debate was open to the public.

7. Theory of Change: understanding the past to help define the future

As part of its commitment to examining its own position as a foundation and as a European organisation, the Evens Foundation began to engage with a Theory of Change process in late 2021.

A Theory of Change is a logical way of demonstrating how interventions can be conceptualised and organised around the changes they create in relation to a particular issue. The Foundation hoped to bring new clarity to its actions and mission and identify areas and opportunities for improvement, change and experimentation. This meant using Theory of Change to explore how a diverse range of projects and programmes contribute to the goals of the Evens Foundation, with the goal of developing indicators and measures of success and agreeing on a clear articulation of what the Foundation aims to achieve.

The approach was designed and overseen by a team from the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University: Tom Fisher, Emily Paffet, and Daniel Range. This team has co-developed and grown an innovative and unique “micro-ethnography”based model of evaluation, tailored to engaging with and understanding the need and actions of stakeholders in complex organisations and interventions. The approach is centred around collaboratively produced Theory of Change models and has been successfully used to evaluate UK government programmes, including Prevent, major EU-funded pieces of work and a diverse portfolio of public, private and voluntary sector schemes across the world.

Early in 2022, each member of the Evens Foundation’s team – including its board – was interviewed and then invited to join an away day in Brussels in May. During this day, a model was developed that showed how the Foundation’s activities generate outcomes during and after their delivery, which link to each other and to an overarching aim.

The process culminated in a report, delivered in September 2022, which outlined the core strengths and weaknesses of the Foundation as it currently stands.

8. Common Purpose Through Differences

Common Purpose Through Differences is one of the two strategic initiatives that provide the core structure for the activities of the Foundation. Initially conceived in 2018, the two initiatives provided a framework for the Foundation’s projects until 2022.

The projects that fall within the Common Purpose Through Differences initiative are designed to surface the commonalities that connect the multifarious communities within contemporary Europe.

From explorations of political community to representations of history within education and providing a platform for diverse experiences of museum spaces, each project aims to critically engage with and find ways to celebrate the multiplicities within culture and society.

Projects: Sharing European Histories (p.14), What Makes An Assembly? (p. 14), Voi[e,x,s] (p. 15) also rolled out across Armenia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia in November and December 2022. The aim of this series was to deliver training for these strategies in different contexts across Europe and understand how they can be adapted to and implemented in a variety of scenarios.

8.2 What Makes An Assembly?

From assemblies in Indigenous territories in Brazil to those of the Yellow Vests in France, from medieval communes to street parliaments in Africa, from citizen’s assemblies set up by public authorities to practices forged from emancipatory traditions, this cross-disciplinary, critical inquiry features 25 original essays and conversations with artists, activists and scholars, alongside three new architectural experiments.

8.1 Sharing European Histories

The Sharing European Histories initiative was developed by the Evens Foundation in partnership with EuroClio, the European Association of History Educators. Its aim is to support innovative projects and pioneering strategies that help young people understand the complexity, multiplicity and transnationality of European history.

At the beginning of 2022, we initiated the second phase of the project. Over the course of the year, five new teaching strategies were developed. The new strategies are: Researching Local Impacts of Global Developments to Make History Real; Debating Controversial Representations in Public Spaces to Understand Contested Historical Legacies; Curating a Museum Exhibition to Enhance Students’ Understanding of Historical Interpretation; Telling Stories about Borders to Understand the Importance of Historical Contexts; and Comparing and Contrasting Different Accounts of the Same Event to Understand the Complexity of the Past.

During the 2022 EuroClio Annual Conference the strategies were presented to a group of peers for a first review after which they were reworked. Once finalised, the strategies were made available on sharingeuropeanhistories.eu

A new series of teacher training sessions based around the new Sharing European Histories teaching strategies was

Towards the end of 2022, the Evens Foundation published What Makes An Assembly? Stories, Experiments and Inquiries with Sternberg Press.

The publication is the culmination of Assemblies: Modern Rituals – a long-term research project initiated by the Foundation in 2018.

Weaving together the anthropological, aesthetic, and political aspects of assembly-making, What Makes An Assembly? explores the potential of assemblies to reimagine the way democracy is practiced in contemporary societies.

Throughout history, the assembly has played a key role in shaping politics. From the official structures of government to citizen-driven protest movements, when people gather their power to affect change increases exponentially.

Edited by the Evens Foundation’s programme curator Anne Davidian and political scientist and sociologist Laurent Jeanpierre, What Makes An Assembly? examines ancestral, transcultural ways of coming together and how forms of assembly are evolving against a backdrop of growing political unrest. It brings together accounts by those who practice assemblies and contributions from artists, activists, historians and social scientists, along with three new architectural experiments.

Contributors include: Ayreen Anastas, Andreas Angelidakis, Hans Asenbaum, Frédérique Aït-Touati, Richard Banégas, Sandra Benites, Jean Godfrey Bidima, Patrick Boucheron, Florence Brisset-Foucault, Manuel Callahan, François Cooren, Armando Cutolo, Piersandra Di Matteo, Pascale Dufour, Ben Eersels, Tallulah Frappier, Rene Gabri, Delphine Gardey, Alana Gerecke, Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, Pablo Lafuente, Laura Levin, Stacey Liou, Catherine Malabou, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Florian Malzacher, Markus Miessen, raumlabor, Philippe Uraflino, Yellow Vests, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, and Ana Terra Yawalapiti.

A pre-launch event was held at Centre Pompidou, gathering together several contributors of the publication: architect Markus Bader (co-founder of raumlabor), historian Patrick Boucheron, and political scientist Delphine Gardey. The discussion was conducted within the context of an installation project by Berlinbased raumlabor, connected to the publication (read more on this in 9.2.2).

The soft launch of the book in November 2022 was complemented by a social media and communications campaign.

8.2.2 Raumlabor’s Forms of Assembly at Centre Pompidou

As part of the commissioning process for What Makes An Assembly? and the research for the Assemblies: Modern Rituals project, the Foundation invited leading architects and designers to create new proposals, which each present a different potential infrastructure for an assembly.

In May 2022, one of these experimental projects – conceived by Berlin-based architecture collective raumlabor – was realised in the form of an installation at Centre Pompidou, building on the Foundation’s existing partnership with this leading cultural institution through the co-production of a prototype for a new assembly space.

Raumlabor – recipient of the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Biennale – imagined an open, organic and utopian form for collective gatherings, without a clear protocol of inhabitation and use. Located in Forum-1 of the Centre Pompidou, Forms of Assembly was a modular and versatile structure that was used for discussions, lectures, performances and film nights.

The installation was in place from May to September 2022, and was a key element in a number of the institution’s activities during that period.

8.3 Voi[e,x,s]

The Evens Foundation and the research centre Theatrum Mundi established the Voi[e,x,s] Research Fellowship in 2019 to investigate how a shared aesthetic experience could enrich the relationship between people and their environment, centred around the transformation of the disused railway depot Chapelle-Charbon in Paris.

A new publication by Dimitri Szuter, Research Fellow, Theatrum Mundi & Evens Foundation was published in 2022, as part of the research commissioned through this partnership.

Voi[e,x,s]. Une en-quête politique indisciplinée offers a critical reflection on – and a speculative protocol for –performance-making as a tool for engagement in urban transformation. It is available to read for free online.