Swiss Initiative

artasfoundation received a mandate from the Swiss Embassy in London to design and implement a series of 7 webinars on Art in Mediation for a group of mediation and art professionals over a period of 8 months. The webinar series served as a replacement for a series of workshops that were planned in preparation for the conference Rethinking mediation: exploring the potential of art and artistic practices in peace processes, by the Swiss Embassy, but cancelled due to the Covid pandemic. Between 12 and 20 people from different regions of the world took part in each webinar, which always began with short presentations. Topics such as the use of language in literature and mediation, the role of trust, the inherent logic of artistic processes or examples of concrete dialogue initiatives in South Sudan or Syria formed the subject of the discussions between artists and the participants from diplomacy and mediation.

A summary of the webinar series is published in the book Arts in Peace Mediation and on the website Art in Mediation

In June 2015, the Swiss Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Alexandre Fasel, invited a group of artists and experts in conflict mediation to a colloquium at his residence to exchange views on how art can support diplomatic conflict mediation. As artists and mediators explained their work practices to each other and described the unresolved questions arising thereby, a lively discussion about possibilities of cooperation emerged. At the end, the host said “It is my impression that, as a result of the discussion, we are beginning to depict what the ground for collaboration between art and mediation might look like – that it grasped ‘something’ that could grow.” A summary of the results of the colloquium can be found in the Brochure Art in Mediation