Learning Through Encounters: Rethinking Cultural Practice Across Institutions and Informal Spaces

In March 2026, İlkay Bilgiç from mezopArt visited Amsterdam/Netherlands. Reflecting on the visit, İlkay shares her thoughts in her own words:

As the founder of mezopArt, an independent cultural initiative based in Türkiye, I approached this mobility not only as a learning opportunity for my own professional development but also as a way to think more strategically about the future of our work. I was particularly interested in understanding how different actors within the Dutch cultural landscape, institutions, independent initiatives, support organisations, and informal communities, interact with one another and create conditions for collaboration and experimentation.

One of the most striking observations throughout this process was that the strength of the Dutch cultural ecosystem lies not only in its institutions, but also in the support structures surrounding them. Alongside established museums and cultural organisations, there is a strong emphasis on knowledge-sharing, mentorship, innovation, and long-term organisational resilience.

Through visits to institutions such as Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Eye Filmmuseum, and Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, I reflected on how cultural organisations construct narratives, engage audiences, and balance historical representation with contemporary perspectives.

At the same time, spaces such as Mediamatic, NDSM Wharf, and A Lab offered a different perspective on cultural production. These environments operate as living ecosystems where artistic practice intersects with ecology, technology, entrepreneurship, and community engagement. Their process-oriented approaches challenged conventional distinctions between institutions and independent initiatives, demonstrating how flexibility and experimentation can become core organisational values.

A particularly meaningful encounter took place at Framer Framed, where conversations around socially engaged art, research, and public programming resonated strongly with my own work through mezopArt. Coming from an independent cultural context in Türkiye, I was interested in how artistic production can be connected to long-term knowledge creation and public discourse rather than being limited to project-based outputs.

Another important insight emerged through conversations with Art-up, an organisation that supports cultural professionals and institutions through training, advisory programmes, and innovation trajectories. This encounter highlighted the importance of investing not only in artistic projects, but also in the organisational capacities that enable cultural initiatives to adapt, collaborate, and sustain themselves over time.

Beyond institutional contexts, informal encounters played an equally important role in this mobility. Participating in community-based events and spending time in spaces such as Mezrab reinforced the idea that cultural learning often happens through proximity, dialogue, and shared experience.

The mobility also included participation in Stories of Migration, our collaborative project with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and New Women Connectors. This experience offered an opportunity to reflect on how transnational collaborations can be embedded within research-based institutions and how temporary artistic communities can engage with existing infrastructures to create meaningful exchanges.

For me, one of the key lessons from this mobility has been that cultural ecosystems thrive when they invest not only in content, but also in the conditions that make collaboration possible. Sustainable cultural practice requires spaces for experimentation, structures for support, and networks that encourage long-term relationships.

These reflections will directly inform the future development of mezopArt by strengthening our commitment to participatory, process-based, and transnational approaches. They also encourage us to think more critically about how independent cultural initiatives in Türkiye can build resilient networks, create shared learning environments, and develop collaborations that extend beyond individual projects.

Ultimately, this mobility reaffirmed that learning in the cultural field happens not only through formal programmes or institutional frameworks, but through encounters between people, ideas, practices, and places. It is within these encounters that new possibilities for cultural practice emerge.