This symposium will open a conversation about citizen-organized support structures for undocumented people and refugees in Brussels: people and collectives who support by extending care from their family and intimate circles to “strangers”, people who they don’t know, people from different countries, cultures, religions and often in higher precarity. It is a question of hospitality and care.

What forms of citizen-organized mutual aid exist in Brussels?

What motivates people to support?

What are the difficulties and ethical implications?

My PhD research unfolds within the artistic practice of co-initiating and co-facilitating housing project that include people in high legal and housing precarity. It explores how care can be integrated into everyday life by sharing living space together. For the symposium I invite people who are involved in various ways in the support of migrants and refugees to share their experience.

I see community practice a relevant field where disciplines of activism, social works and art touch and are able to cross-pollinate. The question of ethics is at the core of the work that attempts to support people in higher precarity and becomes extremely relevant within a growing global inequality, (forced) migration and state violence.

How to live (together) in an unfair world?

Can we gesture beyond charity towards forms of mutual, allyship and shared struggle?

Join us if you are having similar questions, or are interested to find ways how to inform yourself and your practice with mutual aid and care ethics.

The symposium will start with a number of moderated questions and then transform into a communal discussion.