Mission

Globe Aroma is an artistic workspace and cultural meeting place that offers space, time and a network to artists and art enthusiasts in forced displacement. Globe Aroma supports people who face obstacles in accessing the artistic sector and engaging in cultural activities due to their precarious citizenship status.

Globe Aroma builds, in alliance with the Flemish, Brussels and international cultural, educational and migration sectors, an inbetween space in which a community in exile can create, explore and share art with a wide audience.

Our multidisciplinary approach is based on three pillars:

  1. An artistic workspace (with coworking space, atelier, medialab, rehearsal room) where artists work on their projects.
  2. Facilitate the exchange of knowledge via experimental co-creation platforms.
  3. Organizing cultural visits to small and large art venues in Brussels and Flanders.

Glossary

  • The term people in forced displacement refers to people who have left or been forced to flee the country in which they originally lived. People in exile can reside in our country under different circumstances: through family reunion, humanitarian regularization, via refugee procedures, as recognized refugees, in temporary settlements, stateless individuals,…

    Globe Aroma prefers to use the the description “people in forced displacement” over “newcomers”. Many members of our community have arrived one day under the term of newcomers, but do not hide forever behind this label. We want to put people and their artistic ambition first and the label in the background.    In everyday language, the term “newcomer” is understood as an administrative label used by governments and institutions – alongside other labels such as refugee, migrant, asylum seeker – to control and manage human mobility.

    At the same time, we also acknowledge the importance of this label for individuals who live in fear of being persecuted, threatened, and abused, and the opportunities that a newcomer status offers for the “normalization” of everyday life.Yet we often see administrative labels replicating violence in ways that are painfully similar to those of European colonial history and other forms of social exclusion. That is why we try to be as careful as possible with terms and labels: we make them clear when appropriate and minimize them when needed, as much as possible in diaologue with the people involved.

  • The Globe Aroma community consists of people from different backgrounds who have various experiences or approaches regarding art, people who are at the beginning of an artistic journey but also people with more well-established artistic practice, people working with crafts and people working with digital methodologies, people who make art as an individual or collectively, people with a long history in the Flemish and Brussels cultural industry, people who are just starting to find their way in the art industry or want to stay on the side-lines of the industry, and people who are new to the art world.
  • Citizenship refers to the ability of people to legally, politically, socially and culturally participate in the social life of a country. People with newcomer status are more likely to face specific challenges that limit their access to the arts sector (e.g. limited financial resources, lack of networking, no access to affordable workspaces or materials, limited educational opportunities, limited transportation,…). Globe Aroma works with people regardless of language barriers, paperwork obstacles or other restrictions due to immigration laws.

Vision

Our vision is based on seven main pillars that form the value base of our organization.

  1. Globe Aroma functions as an affective arrival infrastructure. Unlike asylum and migration services which start from the formal and procedural aspects of ‘arrival’. Globe Aroma is affective in the sense that it can be used as a creative tool to express and experience emotions, thoughts and ideas.
    In Globe Aroma, people are not asked why they are there, what their citizenship status is or how long they plan on staying in Belgium. Globe Aroma focuses primarily on the artistic journey that people wish to pursue.
  2. For Globe Aroma, the desire or need to create, develop or discover an artistic work is the starting point for each individual encounter. The team and the infrastructure try to support artists and art enthusiasts in achieving their goals.
  3. Globe Aroma values the importance of infrastructure in which people can create, develop, learn and exchange with each other. Not everybody has easy access to infrastructure of art and creation. We invite people to use our infrastructure as a space to meet, create, connect and belong.
  4. Globe Aroma believes in a strong sense of shared ownership. Collectively we determines the focus, scale and composition of projects. To this end, we try to challenge our traditional organizational structure and preconceptions, including through evaluation and co-programming.
  5. Globe Aroma relies on the power of alliances and consistently forges lasting collaborations. By setting up projects based on consciously and carefully chosen partnerships, Globe Aroma builds a bridge between its artistic community and the field surrounding it. The focus is on creating a hybrid network where people in exile, solidarity citizens and people working in the fields of migration, integration, education and the arts meet and exchange thoughts.
  6. Globe Aroma sees collaboration not as a one-way street, but as a process of mutual learning and discovering each other’s perspectives, interpretations and expectations.
  7. Globe Aroma is all about working in close proximity. Hospitality is therefore our main principle. We are searching for a shared artistic ground, honoring each person’s perspective, purpose, or frame of reference. At the same time, we recognize the delicate complexity of this aspiration.

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