The 2025 Safe Havens Meeting – Crafting Togetherness and Creative Pathways in a Digital Era was held between 23 and 26 September in the VFairs Digital Platform. As every year, our goal is to provide a platform where participants can engage in discussions that broaden our knowledge and understanding of artistic freedom across various geopolitical contexts, providing the tools we need to support artists at risk, and enable us to act directly and effectively to advance artistic freedom.
Safe Havens Meeting 2025
This edition once again showed the profound collective strength of our community, registering more than 150 artists, cultural professionals, academics, and representatives from various NGOs and funding organisations. Throughout the event, we engaged in discussions regarding the complexities of maintaining artistic freedom within fragile environments and identified the most pressing needs for artists working under high-risk conditions.
The programme sessions cultivated solidarity as participants recognised their shared challenges and experiences. The meeting provided a valuable platform for artists to showcase their distinguished portfolios, supported collective resilience, and inspired future collaborative projects and strategic partnerships. The programme included curated discussions on topics such as the state of artistic freedom in Africa, creative freedom of artists from Syria and Palestine, new funding approaches, diasporic bodies under surveillance, archiving and oral history in connection to artistic freedom, and art and advocacy in Mayan territories. Also, it incorporated artistic interventions, brainstorming sessions focusing on empowering artistic freedom in Southeast Asia, artists as allies, media in support of artists’ rights, open-floor exchanges, and exhibition spaces on the digital platform.
This event was organised by the Safe Havens Freedom Talks (SH|FT) and supported by the Swedish Arts Council – Artistic Freedom Programme.
