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Are you curious about other people’s stories and the lifestyles that are unlike your own? Are you someone who seeks out similarities amongst the differences?
Kosmopolis Rotterdam uses art and culture to make people from diverse cultural backgrounds curious about each other’s lifestyles and ways of doing things. Here, we are hoping that people will relate to each other - no matter how different they may be and wish to remain - that the barriers will decrease, the prejudices be modified and the distance reduced so that similarities can be recognised and acknowledged, and a dialogue will be established.
Are you someone who enjoys being yourself and remaining true to yourself? Who is different from the rest: unique yet curious, adventurous and eager to exceed your personal boundaries? Are you someone who would like to share what has never been shared, to say what has been left unsaid, and who wants to abandon personal prejudices so as to recognise and appreciate similarities?
Kosmopolis Rotterdam aims at forging links between people both in local neighbourhoods and cultural organisations: between young and old from a variety of backgrounds, and between people of ideas and those of action. Kosmopolis Rotterdam works with all these people so as to launch a range of activity programmes at various locations throughout the city. Here, anything is possible so long as the event makes the participants curious about each other’s stories, history and culture; so long as it is based on what’s happening right now, yet goes beyond the world that we know.
Are you someone who’s aware of differences yet is also actively interested in them? Who respects and even benefits from them? And who endeavours to transform mutual differences into joint actions: into a future to be shared by all?
Kosmopolis Rotterdam endeavours to transform differences between people into joint actions. In fact, we deploy these differences to create extraordinary, artistic projects. Kosmopolis Rotterdam organises cultural activities throughout the city as to share peoples’ separate histories, and to work together on forging a new, joint future.
Anything is possible here: projects both big and small that vary from public discussions to exhibitions, from film workshops to theatre productions, from themes such as food culture, hairstyle and clothing fashions to religious principles, stand-up comedians and sleeping with the neighbours.
Are you someone who is no longer willing to wallow in well-intentioned discussions that lead to frustration and distance, and rarely result in rapprochement?
Kosmopolis Rotterdam is inviting everyone. We are not a funding body but a place that everyone can approach for help. We connect small ideas with big ones, and develop major plans in co-operation with different groups. Kosmopolis invites the people of Rotterdam to work together on extraordinary projects. Almost all our activities take place in the city’s neighbourhoods, on the street and in the different districts. But we don’t limit ourselves to the narrow confines of the local level. That would be impossible: for the neighbourhood is a part of the city, and the city is a part of the world. Hence, our projects are held in our own neighbourhoods yet focus on the entire world: their structure is national and even international, large-scale and broadly based.
That’s Kosmopolis Rotterdam. So who are you?