What inspires Marsa Foundation to engage in field support?
We are driven by the belief that artists and collectives working in fragile contexts deserve sustained support to continue creating, imagining, and resisting through their work.
Our team is inspired by transregional collaboration -building alliances between cultural workers across the Arab region and diaspora to share resources, knowledge, and care beyond institutional limitations.
We see field support as a way to reimagine the ethical, emotional, and infrastructural foundations of cultural work – ensuring that creative practices are nurtured in environments of care and trust.
Title: to be filled
What We Are Testing
The project adopts a transregional approach that connects artists, researchers, and grassroots collectives across the Arab region to reclaim and reimagine archival practices in constrained contexts. Through residencies, workshops, and the support of archival collections within community spaces, it facilitates access to buried artistic and cultural collections and cultivates collaborative methodologies for research, translation, and creative engagement with suppressed histories.
Grounded in social, political, creative, and emotional urgency, the project centers collective care, transregional solidarity, and creative resistance. It advances archival practices that prioritize transformation, ethical engagement, and the activation of memory as a shared cultural and social resource.
Horizontal Collaboration
Testing models of equitable collaboration between collectives, community spaces, and cultural entities—where knowledge, authorship, and decision-making are shared across networks rather than centralized.
Reclaiming Archival Agency
Investigating how grassroots and artistic initiatives can access, interpret, and creatively activate suppressed archives, particularly within politically restricted environments and contexts of limited public access.
Transregional Solidarity
Testing collaborative frameworks that connect practitioners across the Arab region to engage with contested histories and cultural erasure.
Care in Archival Practuce
Evaluating how care-based approaches can support ethical engagement with trauma and memory, while fostering sustainable cultural ecosystems.
As we carry out this experiment, we are asking ourselves:
- How do we practice culture within critical social and political frameworks?
- How could we work collaboratively in order to make a stronger impact and face challenges both locally and regionally?
- How could our structure and work be specific but also flexible and adaptive to our regional and local contexts?
- How could we navigate material realities of loss and grief of our own team members and communities as we carry our vision to keep learning and making art?
- How do we leave everyone we interact with—especially through long-term programs—with meaningful and lasting change?
- How can we exchange cultural practices and methodologies effectively with other institutions and practitioners?
- How do we turn evaluation feedback into actionable, applicable outcomes?
- What strategies can help us empower and enable cultural actors in their different roles more effectively?
Meet the team
Marsa Foundation (Arabic for Harbour or Anchor) is a Netherlands-based cultural organization dedicated to supporting freedom of creativity and expression across the Arab region and diaspora. Marsa works to incubate artistic, cinematic, and cultural initiatives in contexts where such support is often lacking.
The foundation offers financial, organizational, and strategic backing to filmmakers, artists, and cultural spaces, while critically examining the structures through which cultural work is produced. Marsa places strong emphasis on workplace ethics, wellbeing, and governance, aiming to transform creative content through elevating the conditions under which it is made.
Marsa’s team brings together a diverse group of cultural practitioners, researchers, and producers committed to cross-disciplinary experimentation, radical imagination, community care, and transregional collaboration. Marsa’s work is centered around four frameworks: Creative Catalyst, Critical Knowledge, Meeting Points, and Fiscal Sponsorship, spanning film development labs, archival activations, and alternative modes of distribution and exhibition—reimagining how stories are told, shared, and sustained.
For this Experimentation Plan, participating team members are:
Esraa Youssef, Programs Development Officer
Mostafa Youssef, Executive Director
Mansour Aziz, Executive Director