Wekalet Behna
Wekalet Behna is an art space in Alexandria that offers a platform for film screenings, visual media, and visual arts events in order to build various interactive participatory audiences. It also supports and builds the capacity of artists and others interested in working on archive and develops discussions, thoughts, and skills around cinema and visual arts.
What We Are Testing
Behna’s field-support experiment as part of the learning journey.
Personal Development Path
Enhancing individual capabilities and expanding expertise through travel, engagement with similar initiatives, and cross-contextual learning opportunities.
Work Environment Enhancement
Cultivating a healthy, psychologically safe workspace by collaborating with experts to strengthen core skills, energy management, and guidance techniques.
Reflective Path
Conducting brainstorming sessions to examine our aspirations for the cultural and civic landscape while envisioning future possibilities.
Skill Development Path
Building key soft skills that align personal growth with defined roles in the organization, ensuring each team member is supported in their ambitions.
As we carry out this experiment, we are asking ourselves following learning questions
- 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?
What inspires our field support work?
- In the suffocating competition-based world we live in, field support is truly a breath of fresh air that we are excited for, as a way of overcoming the increasing pressure of production as opposed to mutual growth.
- We are excited to share our experience in more effective and direct ways through open channels of communication through which information, resources and learning outcomes flow freely.
- As our work environment turns more and more into a supportive community, we become increasingly excited to extend this atmosphere to near and far similar communities/organisations with shared visions, so we can meet where we intersect and grow into virtual nurturing giants for culture everywhere.
General Approach
Culture is everything. It’s not just a facet of humanity, it is its mirror and litmus test, when it thrives we thrive and when its spaces shrink, we shrink with it. From this belief and with the support of IAC berlin, we’re trying to find the gaps between our inner worlds and outer ones, between our priority of establishing a bustling culture scene that is free enough and supported enough to reflect and improve the world it exists in and our personal needs that by filling which individually and collectively we turn into a more stable and creative unit that supports both individual growth and collective spiral growth that feeds back into the outcomes of our programs and collaborations with participants and other institutions within the same field.
Meet the Team
We are a dynamic team of 10-11 individuals from all walks of life and all age groups, united by our passion for cultural work and our love for the arts. From our youngest member, just twenty, to our oldest, we run through a dynamic atmosphere that leaves so much space for innovation and creative ideas to take place.
While we each hold specific roles, there’s plenty of room for experimentation and skill development. Everyone is encouraged to grow in their own way within a framework that prioritizes experimentation and creative growth in our local community. Each team member – regardless of background – is both a seed and an anchor for other local creatives to shine the light of their talents on our charming city Alexandria.
In an environment where volunteerism is an asset, we have managed to turn our shared investment in Behna into a dynamic community that thrives on diversity and communal learning. We truly believe Behna is a living, breathing organism – and we are its organs -breathing and cleansing and digesting the changing faces of Alexandria and constantly evolving with it for the sake of a better creative future for us all.