Collective art practices are shaping cultural landscapes worldwide. But what defines a collective? How do they function, and what makes them unique? Collectivize (Culture) is a research and networking project that highlights the structures, strengths, and challenges of collectives in the cultural sector. By bringing together voices from different collectives, we aim to close this gap of understanding: Collectivity is an essential part of cultural engagement and precisely important because of the diverse forms it can take.

Artistic and cultural production has long centred around the figure of the individual artist or genius. But collectives challenge this narrative, shifting focus from solo authorship to shared creative processes.

While collectivity is often praised or critiqued for its unique aesthetical and political appearance, little attention has been paid to the infrastructures that sustain it. What keeps a shared cultural practice alive? What are the commonalities between different collectives? How do they organize resources, decision-making, and care song themselves and towards their surrounding?

collectivise.org takes a new approach: Instead of extracting generalized knowledge, we highlight recurring patterns across various collectives, empathizing their communalities while praising the uniqueness of each approach and context.

Collectivity is a way of organizing, where a group decides on doing something together. How exactly they do that heavily depends on the given context, and can be rather different.
Cultural groups around the world care for the resources, values, and heritage together, by developing a cultural way of collectively solving things.

Collectives stand in-between individuals and the public. They form around specific ideas and help people to confront a need they could not solve alone.

In collective work, goals and visions develop out of a habit of doing, often no individual leader decides where to go.
This leads to outcomes that often appear somewhat improvised.

Who belongs to a collective and who doesn't is often not defined by clear roles. Often it is rather a matter of concrete engagement and can change over time.

Collectives often struggle with visibility and credibility, as their practice is not understood clearly. Part of this problem is, that there is no clear language to describe the specific features of collectivity.

We aim at solving this problem collectively: By creating a GLOSSARY OF COLLECTIVE INFRASTRUCTURE, we collect different voices from the field and make them comparable. The glossary gathers self-descriptions from collectives and identifies communal topics. This evolving lexicon helps both cultural policymakers and grassroots initiatives articulate the significance of collective work.

Collectivize (Culture) is a research initiative dedicated to mapping and understanding collective work in the arts. While collectives are often discussed in terms of their aesthetics or activism, their organizational structures remain underexplored. Our research shifts this focus, emphasizing how collectives sustain themselves, distribute responsibilities, and build alternative infrastructures.

The project began with an in-depth case study of 15 collectives in Tunis and Cairo in 2024. The team formed as part of an art and cultural residency format, enabled by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). These cities in the MENA region allow for a unique insight into collectivity, as many of the groups we were dealing with formed in response to political and economic constraints. Through interviews and participatory observations, we have identified common patterns in collective organization, resource-sharing, and governance.

Our team—Bahman Iranpour, Julian Kraemer, Lilli Kim Schreiber, and Mariem Bettouhami—brings expertise from cultural theory, artistic practice, and social sciences. Together, we aim to make collectivity more visible, understood, and supported through research, digital tools, and advocacy.