From Practice to Policy
Taking place at Foundation We Are during Dutch Design Week 2026, the programme combines a hands-on workshop with European case studies and perspectives. By sharing practical experiences across different contexts, the evening asks how fairer and more sustainable collective practices can be built when conventional funding and institutional structures fall short.
The programme connects this local, practice-based perspective to a wider European debate on the conditions under which artists and cultural professionals work. Behind every artistic work is an artistic worker, and fair working conditions and remuneration are increasingly recognised at European level as essential to a resilient, diverse and inclusive cultural sector. The EU’s Culture Compass for Europe places fair working conditions, stronger dialogue with cultural and creative sectors, and more accessible cultural funding among its priorities. The EU Artists’ Charter, in particular, sets out principles for fair and transparent working conditions and aims to strengthen compliance and accountability across the sector.
Collective models
Across Europe, artists, designers and cultural practitioners are exploring more collective ways of working in response to the growing pressures and precarity of the creative economy.
Collective approaches can offer forms of support, connection, care and resilience that are often difficult to sustain within increasingly individualised working structures. At the same time, creating and maintaining these forms of solidarity requires time, resources and shared responsibility — raising an important question: how can we support one another without creating yet another layer of unpaid labour?
In different contexts, practitioners are experimenting with ways of sharing resources, costs, risks and responsibilities, from cooperative models and collective ownership to shared infrastructure and new approaches to income and financial solidarity.
FAIR P(L)AY invites us to explore these practices together. What might we gain by moving beyond the idea of the creative practitioner as an entirely independent economic actor? How could we organise risk, resources, income and care differently? And what kinds of collective structures might help build a creative economy that is not only more sustainabl
