Culturescapes is a multidisciplinary biennial arts festival, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2023. Since 2003, the festival focuses on the cultural landscapes of countries and regions. Based in Basel, Switzerland, it extends its presence far beyond one city or country with the network of more than 40 partner institutions all over Switzerland, in Belgium, and in the three-countries region between Switzerland, Germany, and France.
With each edition the festival aspires to promote cross-border dialogue and mutual learning between cultures, as well as cooperation and networking. Its founders believe that cultural relations and understanding is a gateway to more inclusive, open, and fair societies.
In 2023, the focus for Culturescapes’ 17th edition is on the Sahara region. By connecting the seas and oceans on the opposite sides of the continent, Sahara used to be a network of pathways, travel routes, carrying and connecting peoples and cultures. Together with artists and curators from within and around Sahara, Culturescapes wants to talk about Sahara today.
We look at the moving borders of the desert and the postcolonial borders of the African countries, question resilience as a key feature of political and socio-environmental reality in Africa, and imagine the possible futures as seen from the vastness of Sahara affected by climate change.
The full festival program can be found here.
Culturescapes is a member of EFA—European Festivals Association, IBA—International Biennial Association, ISPA—International Society for the Performing Arts, and the European Festivals Forest.
42’000
visitors
With each edition, the festival creates a diverse, multi-disciplinary program of events. Now, thanks to the online program visitors from all over the world can also participate in the festival.
15
cities
Each festival edition is a collaborative project developed and realized in cooperation with more than 40 different (cultural) institutions in all language regions of Switzerland.
130
artists
Culturescapes offers a variety of performative and collaborative opportunities to artists from Switzerland and the focus regions of the festival editions.
Team
Jurriaan Cooiman, director
Born 1966 in the Netherlands. Founder and director of Culturescapes.
He studied cultural management at the University of Basel. He was the head of the production agency Performing Arts Services and worked with Od-theater, Circle X Arts, Sankai Juku, Werkbühne Berlin, and the Goetheanum, among others. In 2003, he founded Culturescapes and was a driving force and inspiration behind all festival editions. He lectures on cultural management and networking. In 2024, he was elected to the Board of Directors of the European Festivals Association (EFA).
Kateryna Botanova, curatorial advisor
Curator, cultural critic, and writer. Since 2016, she has co-curated Culturescapes and co-edited the festival’s books.
She advises the EU National Institutes for Culture—EUNIC Global on global cultural relations and cooperation issues and is on the jury for the EUNIC European Spaces for Culture program. She was a mentor and consultant for various projects under the EU Eastern Partnership Culture Program, which focused on cultural policy analysis, cultural industries, and cultural journalism in the region. She was a director of the Foundation Center for Contemporary Art (Kyiv, Ukraine) and a founder and editor-in-chief of the online journal of contemporary culture Korydor.
She contributed regularly to Neue Zürcher Zeitung among various other media. She is a member of PEN-Ukraine and an Advisory Board member of the RUTA Association. Her essays on decoloniality and cultural practices are included in books published by Routledge, McGill-Queen's University Press, Ibidem Verlag, and Forum Transregionale Studien, among others.
Why did you want to work for Culturescapes?
I joined the team in 2014 as an exhibitions curator. I soon realized that Culturescapes as a festival offered a unique opportunity to combine many of the things I always appreciated about working in the cultural field: multidisciplinary approach, exploration of local cultural landscapes with global reach and significance, and connecting a diversity of artistic voices with different audiences. Over the years, we have developed Culturescapes into a platform for empowerment and awareness of the current issues of our time. I am happy to see Culturescapes as a growing space of caring and mutual learning between different societies and cultures.
Ferran Planas Pla, office assistant
He is a musicologist and saxophonist. He is passionate about various areas of culture, from cultural management, communication, and directing musical and music theater productions to dramaturgy and music research.
Master of Arts in Musicology at the Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media with a focus on historical musicology, music, and gender, as well as sociology. He previously studied saxophone at the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu and historical musicology and ethnomusicology at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya.
Why did you want to work for Culturescapes?
I have always seen culture and art as a way of paving the way for debate and reflection. In this sense, Culturescapes offers a platform for intercultural dialogue and understanding from a multidisciplinary perspective, which I find very enriching and interesting. The diversity of content and form and the innovation of Culturescapes appeal to my inquisitive mind and represent a demanding and stimulating personal challenge.
Board
Henri-Michel Yéré, President of the Board
Born in 1978 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, he has lived in Basel since 2003. He is a researcher at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel and an adjunct lecturer at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).
A trained historian, Henri-Michel Yéré has worked on citizenship and nationality questions in the colonial and postcolonial contexts. His more recent work has taken a sociological slant, looking at the relationships between the natural sciences and society at large. He has worked for seven years at the headquarters of Novartis in Basel, occupying various responsibilities in the field of Diversity and Inclusion.
As a poet, Henri has published two poetry books (2015) and poems and articles in various literary journals.
Sibel Arslan, Board member
Born in 1980 in Erzincan, Turkey, she is a Swiss lawyer and politician. In 2004, she joined Basel's strong alternative (Basels starker Alternative—BastA) and sat on the Grand Council of the Canton of Basel-Stadt from 2005 to 2016, where she belonged to the Green Alliance faction.
Arslan was elected to the National Council in the 2015 Swiss parliamentary elections and re-elected in 2019 and 2023. She is a member of the Foreign Policy Commission and the Legal Affairs Commission. Since 2018, she has also been a member of the United Federal Assembly's Court Commission. Since 2020, she has been a member of the Swiss delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Georg Estermann, Board member
Born in 1991 in Liestal, he studied business administration at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, specializing in financial management. He then successfully completed training as a Swiss-certified public accountant. Estermann works at Hoffmann & Partner AG as a part-time or interim CFO. Before, he was with Ernst & Young for over seven years, including one year as a lead auditor.
From 2020 to 2022, he taught the audit module as a guest lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland. He is also a member of the Expert Commission SME Audit of EXPERTsuisse.
Karen N. Gerig, Board member
Born in 1973, she studied art history and history, focusing on gender studies and cultural anthropology in Basel.
Worked as a cultural journalist for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Basler Zeitung, and TagesWoche from 2000 to 2017. Between 2002 and 2012, she was an online editor and a political reporter at the Basler Zeitung. From 2012 to 2017, Gerig worked for TagesWoche, first as a culture editor and then as a deputy editor-in-chief. She was a member of the board of Kulturbüro Basel. Currently, she is a head of communications at Kunstmuseum Basel.
Annette Schönholzer, Board member
With over 20 years of experience in the Swiss and international world of the arts and culture, she has worked in leading positions in arts funding, as a project, event manager, and co-director of the international art fair Art Basel, and as managing director of the Kunstmuseum Basel.
Throughout her career, she has served on various boards and cultural juries, facilitating and developing concepts and organizations locally, nationally, and internationally. In 2014, she founded .connect the dots, an independent company providing consulting, coaching, and concept services.
She has lived in Basel since 2002, where she is also married. In her free time, culture and nature are top of her list: art, music, literature, theater, traveling abroad, hiking, and biking in the Swiss Alps are sources of inspiration.
Books
Support Us
Together with artists and curators from the Sahara and its surroundings, Culturescapes would like to talk about Sahara today during the next festival edition. Would you like to support the non-profit foundation Culturescapes in this endeavor?
from CULTURESCAPES!