13 – 15 November 2026 at Ljubljana, Slovenia
Open to public
Organised by: Moderna Museum of Modern Art (MG+) and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) and Institute of Radical Imagination
In the framework of: L’Internationale Museum of the Commons project
Venue: Moderna galerija / Museum of Modern Art (MG+), Cankarjeva cesta 15, Ljubljana
Credits:
Co-curated and co-produced – Sara Buraya Boned and Theo Prodromidis (IRI), Adela Železnik and Sanja Kuveljić Bandić (MG+MSUM).
Communication – Ana Schnabl (MG+MSUM), Sara Buraya Boned and Theo Prodromidis
Visual: Škart
With special thanks to: all the participants of the programme, the support of our companions at MG+MSUM, all collaborators of Raising care platform along the years, and to the rest of IRI Raising Care group: Elena Blesa Cábez, Jesús Carrillo, Pablo García Bachiller, Magdalena Fragnito, Elena Lasala Palomar and Gabriella Riccio.
The three-day encounter Raising Solidarity and Care: Organizing for Health and Mutual Support, taking place at the Museum of Modern Art (MG+) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM), is a result of collaboration between Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM) and the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), in the framework of the L’Internationale project Museum of the Commons.
Started by the IRI in 2020, Raising Care is a long-term platform that investigates how forms of care can be organized outside, alongside and against increasingly inadequate or exclusionary institutional systems. This sustained conversation and debate around care as a political practice continues bringing together new perspectives and projects, including the experiences of self-managed social clinics, analyzing the working methodologies of a collectively produced international manifesto, mapping different care practices operating in social movements, discussing what has been learned and examining the possible role of art and culture in this context.
The Ljubljana iteration Raising Solidarity and Care: Organizing for Health and Mutual Support proposes a space of conviviality, inviting activists, artists, art and cultural workers from Slovenia and other countries to share their knowledge and imagine possible ways of international organizing in which to merge the notion of care with current local and global concerns, such as violence against migrants on borders and the violation of migrant workers’ rights, the increase in spending on rearmament while the funds allocated to healthcare and other social rights are reduced, and the possibility of imagining strategies to subvert this logic from the art and cultural sector.
Rather than treating care as a single thematic field, this gathering of autonomous collective practices and institutional spaces can use various different struggles to ask how health, rights, labor, culture, migration, transfeminist practices and collective organization intersect in the production of solidarity, while retaining the political genealogy of Raising Care.
Through sharing experiences, collectivizing knowledge, examining different legal tools, and imagining ways of building international strategies and actions, this encounter wants to create a temporary space of solidarity to stand in united resistance against capitalism and to raise awareness of issues such as greater access to healthcare, defending the public healthcare system and supporting self-managed health and care, mental health practices and reproductive labor.
Raising Solidarity and Care will be structured as four assemblies, concentrating on access to health, sexual and reproductive rights, mental health and legal tools, besides open discussions it will include presentations, workshops, artist interventions and film screenings.
The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a group of cultural workers, curators, artists, activists, and scholars with a shared interest in co-producing knowledge as artistic and political research-interventions aimed at implementing post-capitalist forms of life in the Mediterranean and the Global South.
The Moderna Galerija (MG+) and Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM) is a national museum that works, in accordance with its mission, in the fields of modern and contemporary art. It was founded in 1947 as a museum of modern art. With Slovenia’s independence in 1991, Moderna galerija became the principal national institution of modern and contemporary art and an increasingly active link between the local and the international, in particular Central and Eastern European, contexts.
Friday, 13th November
Venue: Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art’s auditorium
17:00h – 20:00h Care solidarity and organizing access to care
How do autonomous initiatives intervene where people are excluded from, abandoned by or unable to navigate public health systems? What forms of solidarity, accompaniment and collective knowledge are being developed?
Contributions: Elke Krasny (Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna), Miha Blažič (Ambasada Rog and Zasuk), Goran Lukić (Workers’ Advisory Office), Federica Orsolon & Matilde Bignotti (Ambulatorio popolare Caracol Olol Jackson), Epistimi Natsoudi & Sofia Balapanidou (Social Solidarity Clinic of Thessaloniki)
Accompanied by Adela Železnik (MG+MSUM) and Theo Prodromidis (IRI)
20:15h – 21:00h Short film screenings and presentation
30 years and one day (2021, 10 min) by Theo Prodromidis
The Image Belongs to Those Who Work With, including:
People’s Voice (2026, 3 min) by Mani Kafle, Vida Zelić
Ahmed’s Thoughts (2026, 7 min) by Ahmed Samir, Dorian Milović
Trying: A Short Manual for Integration (2026, 6 min) by Seid Ibrahim, Karla Mesek
Presentation of the film workshop The Image Belongs to Those Who Work With by Karla Crnčević, Dina Pokrajac, Seid Ibrahim, Karla Mesek and Dorian Milović
Venue: Art’s Studio MG+MSUM
21:00h – 22:00h Social gathering with food provided by the Iskra Student Social Association
Saturday, 14th November
10:30h – 13:30h Sexual and reproductive rights, defend and expand
Venue: Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art’s auditorium
How are sexual and reproductive rights defended and made materially accessible through feminist and autonomous networks? What can we learn from practices of mutual aid and cross-border solidarity? What can we do to achieve real progress in the EU legislative system?
Contributions: Karla Crnčević (presenting the Women’s Antifascist Front – AFŽ), Veronika Povž (Institute 8 March), Mia Malinger & Svit Jeram (Iskra Student Social Association), Jolanta Nowaczyk (Abortion Support Alliance Prague), Ilaria Perolfi & Erica Rodigari (Obezione Respinta)
Accompanied by Adela Železnik (MG+MSUM) and Sara Buraya Boned (IRI)
14:30h – 17:30h Other (de-)institutionalities, critical culture and mental health
Venue: Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art’s auditorium
How do we organize care beyond individualized and medicalized approaches? Which collective infrastructures can respond to distress, isolation and the conditions producing them? How can institutional and non-institutional practices complement each other? What is the role of art, culture and imagination in proposing new visions of care in mental health?
Contributions: Sonja Bezjak (Museum of Madness), Tau Luna (Entrar fuera), Juš Škraban (Social Protection Institute), Darja Zaviršek (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Work), Conferenza Permanente per Salute nel Mondo Franco Basaglia – CoPerSaMM
Accompanied by Sara Buraya Boned (IRI) and Theo Prodromidis (IRI)
Polyphonic interventions for care, tuning art inside out
Venue: Art’s Studio MG+MSUM
17:45h – 18:10h Intervention on RRResuena el RRReina by Francisco Mateo Martínez Cabeza de Vaca (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid)
18:15h – 18:40h Static Voice, Hobhole Hob! (20 min) An absurdist play about mental health
Venue: Moderna galerija/Museum of Modern Art’s auditorium
10:00h Film screening
The Blue Horse of Desire (2026, 23 min), documentary film directed by Staša Prah, Jakob Vogrinec, Ciril Zupan
Stories of a Lie (2025, 76 min), feature documentary film directed by Olia Verriopoulou
Sunday, 15th November
Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova seminar room
09:00h – 10:30h Biodanza workshop by Simona Škorja (MG+MSUM), Trainee Biodanza Facilitator in the Rolando Toro System, Biodanza School of Slovenia
10:45h – 13:30h Legal Clinic Assembly
How can legal knowledge become a collective tool rather than an expert domain? How do communities use, challenge or work around existing legal frameworks? How can artists and self-employed cultural workers mobilize to achieve material and symbolic conditions for work in culture?
Contributions: Jaša Jenull (Voice of the People), Teja Reba (Cultural Saveguard Initiative)
Legal clinic drawing on all the expireinces of Raising Solidarity and Care
Accompanied by Margherita D’Andrea and Giuseppe Micciarelli (IRI)
13:30–14:30 Epilogue Ritual
Škart, united skills > public rehearsal
PARTICIPANTS
Sonja Bezjak holds a PhD in sociology. She conceived and co-founded the NGO Museum of Madness, which she has led voluntarily for 13 years. The museum is housed in Cmurek Castle in Trate, home to Slovenia’s first and only closed institution for people with mental health conditions. The authentic rooms, objects and testimonies preserved there reveal how society treats people with disabilities. The museum operates precariously, relying on its team’s dedication. Its work was recognized in June 2026 with the Kenneth Hudson Award for institutional courage and professional integrity. https://en.muzejnorosti.eu
Miha Blažič – N’Toko, musician, writer/blogger, activist. In addition to writing regularly for Mladina, he is active in the migrant workers’ organization Ambasada Rog and serves as a coordinator for ZASUK, the union of cultural and creative workers. Ambasada Rog is an independent organization of migrant workers in Slovenia. What sets it apart from nongovernmental organizations that work with refugees and unions that represent workers is that it “does not view its members as passive recipients of aid, but as agents of power,” all of whom are fighters in the workers’ struggle.ZASUK is a Slovenian union for creativity and culture that represents workers in the cultural and creative sector. https://ambasada-rog.si/, https://www.zasuk.si/
Sara Buraya Boned (Madrid, 1986) is a cultural worker and network’s weaver. She works at the Museo Reina Sofía, where she began as an assistant in the Collections Department (2009–2011). Since 2013, she has been accompanying, in different ways, cultural programmes, public activities and collaborative networks from within the institution. She is coordinator of the Museo Tentacular Department. Between 2020 and 2023 she was the project leader of the European confederation of museums L’Internationale. She has been member of the editorial board of L’Internationale Online from 2018 to 2024. Her research and institutional work are shaped by a commitment to transfeminisms, politics of care, new institutionalism, archives and the memory of social movements. As part of her political and cultural practice, she is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination, AMECUM (Association of Cultural Mediators of Madrid) and the assembly of Museo Situado. Along her path, she has been part of autonomous projects and collectives like somateca, Calipsofacto, Archivos Comunes or Chantal.
Francisco Mateo Martínez Cabeza de Vaca is a composer, sound artist and music teacher. After almost two decades as a high school music teacher in public schools, since September 2018 he has coordinated the Communities Section of the Education Department of the Museo Reina Sofía. In February 2024, he was appointed Head of the Education Department.
Conferenza Permanente per la Salute nel Mondo Franco Basaglia (CoPerSAMM) is the “Franco Basaglia” Permanent Conference on Mental Health in the World, a nonprofit association founded after the international conference “Trieste 2010: What Is Mental Health?” It builds an international network and ongoing debate in opposition to reductionist approaches to mental health, carrying forward the legacy of Franco Basaglia’s psychiatric reform. Its work promotes innovative public social and health policies, challenges total institutions and practices that exclude people or curtail their rights, and supports training, research, evaluation of good practices and international exchange. Its theoretical and practical framework is the process of deinstitutionalisation initiated by Franco Basaglia in the 1960s and continued by Franco Rotelli and their collaborators.
Karla Crnčević holds a Master’s in Dramaturgy from the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb and in Film Archiving from the Elias Querejeta Film School in San Sebastian. She has worked for many years as a film and cultural worker across different production contexts. She is one of the founders and organizers of Kino Unseen (http://www.kinounseen.org), a platform that focuses on exhibition and cultural policies as well as the revitalization of cinema spaces. Her first short film, Wild Flowers, has been screened at more than 50 international festivals (FidMarseille, Zinebi, Dokufest, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Festival dei Popoli, L’Alternativa…) and has won several awards. Her first feature-length documentary was The Ground Where We Stand. She is interested in memory as a space for speculation and its relationship with the moving image. https://www.karlacrn.com
Margherita D’Andrea is a sociologist of law who collaborates with the Department of Educational Sciences, Psychology and Communication at Suor Orsola Benincasa University of Naples. Her research examines contemporary law in relation to social and environmental struggles, citizen participation in collaborative governance, and the protection of migrants’ rights. She has served as an international human rights observer in Kuwait, Turkey, Morocco and Germany, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights (ELDH). She is involved in the commons and civic-use movement, contributing to legal tools for the participatory governance and collective management of abandoned or underused assets. She recently published La grammatica della collaborazione tra diritto e conflitti (The Grammar of Collaboration between Law and Conflicts).https://na.academia.edu/MargheritaDAndrea/Books
Jaša Jenull is a theatre director and activist with the civic initiative “Voice of the People.” He is one of the most recognizable faces of the protests against Janez Janša’s government, both during the so-called Friday bike protests (2020–2022) and today. Currently, together with former Health Minister Dušan Keber, he is primarily advocating for the preservation of the public health care system.
Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Art and Education Program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship and her international lectures address ecological and social justice at the global present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, curatorial work, and contemporary art. www.elkekrasny.at
Goran Lukić is the president of the association Delavska svetovalnica (Workers’ Advisory Office), dedicated to advocating for, protecting, promoting, and advancing the labour, social, and status rights of workers and other vulnerable groups. https://delavskasvetovalnica.si/o-nas/
Tau Luna is a community mediator, visual artist, researcher, curator, and educator. A non-binary migrant artist, their practice explores migration, colonial violence, shared memory, and forms of listening that connect human and more-than-human life. Their work spans community-based education, transfeminist pedagogy, cultural mediation, and collective research. They are currently collaborating with the militant research collective Entrar Afuera on curatorial research for an exhibition that develops practices of care by examining the relationships between public institutions, urban territories, and the people who inhabit them. Entrar Afuera is a militant research collective exploring and inventing practices of care in the city. Bringing together people working across activism, public health, culture, art, social movements and radical education, it works at the intersection of artistic and expressive practices and mental health. Since 2016, its projects have connected community-based care with health centres, mental health services and cultural institutions, seeking alternatives to coercive and exclusionary models of care
Iskra is a socialist student organization made up of male and female students from various faculties; they also include young workers among their members. They advocate for a dignified life for working-class students and fight against the encroachment of capital on our lives. Among other Iskra’s activities are also advocacy for women and reproductive rights. They strive for the socialization of reproductive labor, which means building and investing in public service systems such as cafeterias, daycare centers, schools, nursing homes, hospitals, laundromats, etc. To raise awareness about this and many other issues, they organize a protest every year on March 8. They strongly defend all hard-won reproductive rights. They strive to ensure access to gynecological services and quality sex education. They organize counter-protests against the “March for Life,” which advocates for the abolition of the right to abortion.
Giuseppe Micciarelli is a political scientist, legal sociologist and activist working on urban commons and participatory democracy. He is a research fellow in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Naples Federico II. Working alongside communities, social movements and artistic initiatives, he helps develop legal tools and policies that support collective struggles. His approach combines the creative use of law with “political and legal hacking”: reshaping existing rules to strengthen collective action and enable concrete change. In Italy, he has contributed to the development of “urban collective and civic use”, a model emerging from occupations of empty or underused buildings in Naples that enables their recognition as self-managed community spaces without assigning them to a single organisation. He chairs the Permanent Observatory on the Commons and collaborates with local authorities on participatory processes. He received the Elinor Ostrom Award in recognition of his research. https://unina.academia.edu/GiuseppeMicciarelli
Epistimi Natsoudi is a psychologist and a mental health nurse in a child psychiatry unit and Sofia Balapanidou is a musicology student and has supportive role to the doctors and mental health specialists at Social Solidarity Clinic of Thessaloniki (KIA), a self-organised solidarity healthcare initiative in Thessaloniki, Greece. KIA is a social health care collective that, since November 2011, has been providing primary medical (out-of-hospital) and pharmaceutical care to all uninsured residents of the city without making any distinctions between people in terms of nationality, race, religion, gender, sexual preference, age. As a primary health structure, it simultaneously pressures the state to ensure free, secondary and tertiary care, hospitalization and rehabilitation for everyone. KIA is part of the movement for a universal free and public health system in Greece. KIA is part of the anti-racist and anti-fascist movement. KIA is part of those solidarity networks of society that concern all the fields and sectors of life that are necessary today to preserve our humanity, to maintain the cohesion of the social fabric, but above all to re-establish relationships and behaviours that rebuild the collectivity and oppose in practice individualism, competition and exploitation of people by people.
Jolanta Nowaczyk is a Prague-based pro-choice activist and artist involved in reproductive justice initiatives. She participates in A.S.A.P. (Abortion Support Alliance Prague), an activist group working to make abortion more accessible, provide reliable information and support, and challenge the stigma surrounding abortion. A.S.A.P. also documents barriers to reproductive healthcare and advocates for people’s right to make decisions about their own bodies. A.S.A.P. — https://interrupce-asap.cz/en/home/
Federica Orsolon and Matilde Bignotti are involved with the Ambulatorio Popolare of Caracol Olol Jackson in Vicenza, Italy. Ambulatorio Popolare Caracol Olol Jackson is a community-based social clinic active since 2019 in Vicenza, Italy, working to guarantee the right to healthcare for people excluded from or facing barriers to accessing public health services. It is part of the International Network of Social Clinics (INOSC) and contributed to the drafting of the Manifesto of Social Clinics, presented in 2024. It also participates in the Veneto regional network of local community clinics and collaborates with the local health authority, ULSS 8 Berica, through an agreement establishing an STP clinic for people without regular residence or documentation. Since 2021, Caracol has developed health and educational programmes in collaboration with the Municipality of Vicenza, addressing the needs of people experiencing homelessness. These include COVID-19 vaccination, oral health education, sexual health and STI prevention, and screening for diabetes and HIV, alongside support and follow-up for people accessing care. The clinic also collaborates with local third-sector organisations and participates in municipal working groups. Since opening, it has recorded approximately 4,000 visits involving more than 1,200 users, demonstrating its role in building accessible, community-based healthcare and networks of solidarity.
Ilaria Perolfi and Erica Rodigari are involved with Obiezione Respinta, a feminist and transfeminist project documenting barriers to reproductive healthcare in Italy. Its public map gathers community reports about pharmacies, clinics, hospitals and other services, helping people identify where access to contraception and abortion care may be obstructed or supported. The project combines shared information, advocacy for reproductive rights, and accompaniment and support to people seeking an abortion.
Veronika Povž is the communications director at the Institute 8 March and for the pan-European campaign “My Voice, My Choice”, a European feminist movement and European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) that advocates for safe, accessible, and free abortion care across the European Union. https://www.myvoice-mychoice.org/
Theo Prodromidis (b. 1979, Thessaloniki) is a visual artist based in Athens. He holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London (2007). Theo’s artistic research and practice on performativity, participation and citizenship has been activated in both institutional and nonformal spaces of knowledge, action and exhibition. His work has been presented at EMST, Galerija Nova, State of Concept, the 1st and 5th Thessaloniki Biennale and the 4th Athens Biennale a.o. His artistic research has been supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture, ARTWORKS and Onassis AiR, and he also participated, through a new production, in the project “Communities of Learning, Bridging the Gap of Isolation”, an initiative of WHW with the support of the Culture of Solidarity Fund of the European Cultural Foundation. In 2023 he was a guest artist at the Department of Public Activities of the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. For 2024-2025, he was resident artist at the ArtExplora festival in the Mediterranean and he developed a new body of work for tranzit.ro/Iași in the framework of Institution(ing)s. He is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination and AFIELD, among others, and co-founder of Scola Society.
Teja Reba is a dancer, performer, program director. Since 2004, she has been working as a self-employed professional in the cultural sector, focusing on contemporary art, performance, theater, and contemporary dance. She studied art history (Sorbonne, Paris) and the performing arts in both academic and informal settings (Germany, Austria, India, Japan, Brazil, the U.S., and Slovenia). She is also active in cultural advocacy. She served as president of the Slovenian Contemporary Dance Association (2013–2016), a member of the Executive Board of the Prešeren Fund (2014–2016), and a member of the Executive Board of the Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture—City of Women (since 2015). Recently she is active within the Cultural Saveguard Initiative.
Static Voice is a grassroots art collective based in Gorizia, Italy, founded by Luka Cammarata, Divina Lorenzon, Dani Borodina and Dave Fain. The collective develops inclusive stories and creative spaces that encourage the destigmatisation of mental health issues and the experiences of marginalised communities. Its project “Silenzio, Parla Lennox” (“Silence, Lennox Is Speaking”) grew out of Luka Cammarata’s tabletop role-playing game Pale Concord and has developed into a dystopian radio drama, with two seasons and 24 episodes available on Spotify. Through character and story, the collective creates space to explore personal and social experiences and to grow together. Guillermo Giampietro, an Argentinian artist, is responsible for the project’s technical work.
Škart (rejects/ausschuss/scarto) > Đorđe Balmazović /Žole + Dragan Protić /Prota has been operating within and around existing hierarchies of the art world and everyday life, working in collaboration with marginalized groups, initiatives, and anti-war movements. Škart’s understanding of artworks is fluid and relationship-based. No matter the medium – poetry, embroidery, graphic design, film, comics, or organizing a choir – its artistic explorations are characterized by self-organization, rooted in creating an open, accessible infrastructure for uniting skills and being together.
Juš Škraban holds a BA in Cultural Anthropology and a PhD in Social Work. He is currently a member of the Center for Deinstitutionalisation, where he works as part of the team coordinating the deinstitutionalisation of social care in Slovenia. His work focuses on developing community-based and person-centred alternatives to coercive institutional social care. https://irssv.si/ekipa/jus-skraban/
Darja Zaviršek is Professor of Social Work and the Chair of the Department of Social Justice and Inclusion and the founder of the Center for the Study of the History of Social Work in the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Ljubljana. Areas of expertise: people with special needs, mental health, disability studies; domestic violence, violence against women and children; feminist theory; child sexual abuse; child advocacy; foster care, adoption; intercultural and anti-racist social work; theories of racism; the internationalization of social work, the history of social work in Eastern Europe; theories of violence; social work in times of political conflict; theories of social work and social policy, intersectionality, sociology of social work. The title of her presentation: Is a normal woman still a man woman?
Cover visual: Škart
