Every year Reset! focuses on one thematic issue that is explored through a range of activities: in person events, live podcasts, members Working Groups, and editorial features during the year.
In 2026, we will launch a 10-article series exploring how independent cultural organisations can drive ethical digital transformation. As tech giants dominate the digital space, cultural sectors must find alternatives that uphold creativity, independence, and integrity. This series will offer inspirations for cultural organisations to fully leverage digital tools—like infrastructure, AI, and data management—while avoiding homogenisation and monopolisation.
Focusing on ethical digital practices, open-source solutions, and community-driven platforms, the series will showcase strategies/case studies for fostering human-centered digital practices. It will explore how cultural organisations can resist the dominance of algorithms and enhance inclusive, sustainable digital ecosystems. By embracing these alternatives, the cultural and creative sectors can shape the future of technology, ensuring that digital transformation won’t compromise their core values.
Rare Effect 2025 — © Filipa Aurélio
Reset! Yearly Focus 2025: Reclaiming Spaces, Cultural Participation and Community-Based Initiatives
Reset!’s 2025 Yearly Focus, “Reclaiming Spaces: Cultural Participation and Community-Based Initiatives,” highlights practices in which artists and grassroots organisations transform neglected, inaccessible, or highly regulated spaces into common cultural ground. The assembled articles explore how these processes foster new forms of participation, making culture something that is co-created rather than simply consumed.
Reclaiming Space as Practice
Across different contexts, reclaiming space emerges as both a symbolic and a material act: it challenges who is allowed to gather, to create, and to be visible in the public realm. From self-managed community venues to youth-led cultural projects, the contributions show how local players reimagine the uses of buildings, streets, and neighbourhood infrastructures, but also of abstract spaces, to respond to social, cultural, and economic difficulties.
Cultural Participation and Agency
Central to this collection is a broader understanding of cultural participation as active involvement in shaping cultural agendas, not only attending events. The featured initiatives demonstrate how shared authorship, co-ownership, and collaborative governance can strengthen a sense of belonging and open up new forms of cultural agency.
An Invitation to the Reader
Readers are invited to move through these articles as a journey across different experiments in place-making, each rooted in its own local reality yet connected by a common desire to redistribute power and visibility. This Yearly Focus thus serves as both documentation and invitation: to notice the cultural potential of the spaces around us, and to imagine how they might be reclaimed, cared for, and shared in new ways.
Launching a party in Space Tetova – © Space Tetova
