Beyond The Now

Counterpoints Arts is one of 7 partners in Beyond the Now – a cooperative social arts practice platform, initiated in response to Covid-19. Working in locations across the globe, we are a mix of small to medium arts organisations, including Counterpoints Arts, (UK) co-culture (Berlin), Ettijahat-Independent Culture (Beirut and Brussels), CREATE (Ireland); together with individual researchers working at the Open University and Plymouth College of Art (UK) and the Mozilla Festival (Amsterdam).

Our collective goal is to open up new creative, cultural and political affinities for a post-pandemic world.

Beyond the Now aims to learn from organic responses of solidarity that have sprung up from communities of place and interest in the context of COVID-19: to build a dialogue between everyday sensibilities and perspectives, disciplines and ways of working; creatively juxtapose and redistribute contributions to this platform with the aim of forging unlikely allies and alliances; and re-imagine the social and socially-engaged art in the light of the global pandemic.

Beyond the Now invites voices from diverse sectors and communities to explore, share ideas and creatively reflect on what narratives, mechanisms and tools might we use to navigate the uncertainties of the present? Where and what is the social, in a post-pandemic world? How is social justice to be realised beyond the now?

In 2023 Beyond the Now launched the Collaborative Incubator Toolkit. As a member of Beyond the Now collective, we have been involved in curating/producing this publication, which is the result of a long-form conversation in which journalists, digital activists and socially-engaged artists draw on their own experiences of migration and forced displacement to inform their criticisms of the way migration is represented by legacy media.