Why Keep Creating Spaces for Art and Writing?
From the Collective to the Personal and from the Personal to the Collective
Just days after the World Day for the Prevention of Child Abuse and on the eve of Human Rights Day, today—on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women—at Urpi Collective, we find ourselves returning to a question that cuts across all of our work, which is, why keep creating spaces for art and writing?
The most honest answer is that we need them in order to live. And yet, art and writing are still often seen as a kind of eccentricity, a luxury for people with time, money, or a “special” talent; something that only a few can, “deserve to,” or have the resources to develop. At Urpi Collective, we have learned precisely the opposite. The personal experiences of those of us who make up Urpi have shown us that we all carry that potential, and that in the most challenging moments of life—a loss, forced migration, a family rupture, collective mourning—creating and writing can mark the difference between feeling completely alone and finding a thread to hold on to.
Art and writing are not ornaments we add once “everything is already solved”; they are tools to move through what is still unresolved. Writing down a memory, a dream, or a rage that has never been spoken aloud helps bring order to inner chaos, recognize that what we have lived through has a history and a context, and realize that we are not the only ones who have experienced it. Sharing that text in a workshop or a reading circle opens another door, as “my” pain starts to enter into dialogue with that of others, and in this way, the personal becomes a key to understanding the collective. At the same time, listening to other voices allows us to see that large-scale forms of violence—racism, classism, sexism, political violence—take shape in concrete lives and bodies, in everyday fears and desires.
Continuing to create spaces for art and writing means committing to that movement between the intimate and the shared. It means recognizing that there is no sustainable social transformation without personal processes of grief, memory, and desire, and that these processes are strengthened when they are lived in community. Workshops, reading circles, writing labs, exhibitions, and independent publications are spaces where people can name what has happened to them, listen to one another, and build narratives together that question violence and make room for more caring ways of living.
This is why we insist that as long as imposed silences exist—about children, about women, about any vulnerable body—we will need spaces where art and writing can continue to open them up, hold them, and transform them into memory and collective action. From the collective to the personal and from the personal to the collective, art and writing help us to sustain one another, to accompany one another, and to imagine lives less marked by violence and more guided by dignity and care.
