Common Grounds: How do we balance safety and freedom?

The fourth dialogue in our Common Grounds series explores the relationship and tension between security and safety. In the current landscape of war, where invasion and occupation persist and genocide is named and denied, many communities are asking urgent questions. With this dialogue, we invite you to consider how creativity and the city of Eindhoven can engage with these realities. How might design, art, and visual communication respond to or reflect on issues shaped by international law? What responsibilities and possibilities do creative disciplines hold in such times? What responsibilities and possibilities are there for us as citizens?

As always, the Common Grounds series invites multiple perspectives and disciplines, this time we’ll sit together with lawyers, designers, and people carrying the memory and impact of war, reparation activists, and legal scholars to unpack these tensions, what they mean for creatives and for citizens in Eindhoven. We’ll explore the potential of artistic work, the practice and persistence of reparation activism, lessons of international law around arms and conflict, and the hope we can find in designing futures centred on rebuilding, return, and recovery.

Join us on Wednesday, 10 December at 19:00 for this sensitive yet urgent dialogue, moderated by Mert Kumru, law student and Public Affairs / European Front Coordinator at World’s Youth for Climate Justice (WYCJ).