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Projects to Come…
OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTS BASED IN PARIS
OPEN CALL FOR ARTISTST BASED IN IRAN
Discover More About us…
Where It Began…
Today’s socio-political landscape keeps moving people across borders, cultures, and identities. Some become displaced, others misplaced, and many find themselves searching for a place that truly feels like their own. Each day, they work to create space for themselves: a corner to stand in, a language to rely on, and a sense of belonging that does not feel shaky.
At the same time, those already rooted, find their environments shifting. New presences reshape familiar spaces and invite communities to reconsider how resources, cultures, and stories are shared.
This dynamic is not new. It is one of nature’s oldest realities.
The Anatomy of Our Name
For millions of years, living beings have existed alongside one another in different ways. Biology calls this symbiosis, from the Greek syn (“together”) and bios (“life”). It refers to relationships between dissimilar organisms, where the nature of the bond depends on how they affect one another.
As a team shaped by both displaced and rooted experiences, we consciously chose mutualism — a form of symbiosis built on shared benefit. A win-win approach that guides our artistic and social practices.
Not the naïve, utopian version, but the living, breathing kind: one that requires attention, curiosity, flexibility, awareness, and the willingness to adapt. It asks us to see difference not as a threat, but as potential.
What Brought Us Together
From witnessing the challenges displaced individuals face in finding their place, and the effort required from rooted communities to listen and make space for unfamiliar voices, we have learned that silences can grow where understanding is needed, creating gaps where we are meant to live together.
SYMBIOTIKA was planted on the belief that these uncertain spaces can become places of growth, where shared difficulty becomes common ground for creative encounters.
SYMBIOTIKA began not as a solution, but as a practice: a win-win proposition for creation, artistic expression, and intercultural togetherness. A platform that promotes access to art, encourages co-creation, and empowers communities — a living workshop for the ongoing, sometimes messy, and often beautiful art of living together.
Our Extended Family…
Today, SYMBIOTIKA is growing through a wide and evolving community of Iranian and international artists, both inside and outside their home countries — from Europe to India, from Africa to the Philippines, and beyond.
Our dream is to keep expanding this network beyond borders and create projects that bring people together and activate the many possibilities each artist carries within their practice. We learned from nature that when different forms of life intersect, synthesis happens, and synthesis is the beginning of a new transformation.
What we wish to do is nurture these connections, create possibilities for these syntheses to happen, and allow our hidden potential to activate new forms of life — not only as artists, but also as members of a society.
The People We Grew With
Artistic Residence in Burgundy, generously hosting our event and accommodating our artists.
A volunteer, Paris-based NGO committed to empowering women in Afghanistan through accessible online education, supporting us in curating the photo exhibition.
Bringing together seven associations committed to supporting the integration of migrants, particularly from Asia, in France.
An independent artistic, political, and social laboratory in Paris — a collaborative space dedicated to experimentation, collective creation, and knowledge-sharing across disciplines such as performance, visual arts, music, cinema, writing, dance, and activism. Functioning as a cooperative and artist-run space, it supports residencies, workshops, performances, screenings, discussions, and alternative cultural practices outside commercial logics.
What We Aim For
SYMBIOTIKA started as a project of coming together and a desire to rebuild the glue between us and create a stronger force of creation through connection, exchange, and collective imagination.
What we aim to:
Facilitating creative togetherness through cultural initiatives that bring people, practices, and ideas into contact with one another.
Connecting artists and sharing resources to open new possibilities for collaboration, visibility, and collective growth.
Empowering artists of our network by sharing stages and programming their practices through concerts, performances, dance, screenings, presentations, workshops, exhibitions, and many other forms of creative expression.
Becoming a voice where voices cannot be heard through talks, seminars, educational materials, online support systems, and fundraising events.
Creating more access to art and culture by promoting artistic works and offering wider opportunities for the public to experience creative expression.
Rebuilding intercultural bridges by giving contemporary and innovative life to old cultural rituals, customs, and celebrations.
Researching and practicing new ways of living together through intercultural gatherings, collective experiences, and artistic exchange.