Living Room

Living Room is a community center in Bern’s Marzili neighborhood. The space enables dialogue between artists, activists and community members to create a unique space where connections can be built and unheard stories can be told. Living Room uses community building, art, expression, healing and participation to address current issues around racism and other forms of exclusion. It’s a place for all of us but especially for those of us who may not have access to other spaces. It’s a place where we can feel at home, just like in our living room, a place where we can feel free.

Living Room has an atelier, library and workspace. We sustain multiple projects: Artists-in-Community, Diaspora University, Living Archiv, and Anticafé.

Tuesday, September 1 2026 00:00–23:00

OPEN CAll

EXPLORING STABILITY AND TURBULENCE FROM NEW PERSPECTIVES

As part of the Artist-in-Community programme and Diaspora University, the Living Room is launching a call for participation for artists, collectives and cultural practitioners wishing to propose an artistic contribution around the theme Stability and Turbulence. Inspired by the project TURBULENCE, this call invites participants to question what stability means in a world shaped by crises, displacement, ecological upheaval, social conflict and intimate transformations.

From September 2026 to the end of March 2027, the Living Room will host an artistic contribution in the form of exhibitions, performances, readings, screenings, installations, workshops, participatory formats or interdisciplinary projects. The aim is to create a space for reflection, exchange and dialogue with the audiences and communities who engage with the Living Room.

Theme
We invite participants to respond to the central question: what does stability mean in a world marked by turbulence? Proposals may address, among other themes, experiences of war and displacement, forms of personal and collective resilience, ecological instability, social tensions, power relations, and the intersections between privilege, vulnerability and belonging.

Who can participate?
The call is open to artists, collectives, researchers, cultural activists and practitioners working in visual arts, performance, writing, sound, film, digital practices, installations, participatory formats or transdisciplinary approaches. We particularly encourage proposals that build connections with local, diaspora, migrant or other communities concerned with questions of transformation, fragility and resistance.

What the Living Room offers
The selected projects will be presented at the Living Room in Bern between September 2026and the end of March 2027. Artists will benefit from a hosting framework, curatorial support and a space to present their work to an engaged audience. Each contribution may be accompanied by a public exchange, a post-presentation discussion, a workshop or a moment of dialogue with the community.

How to apply
Applications should include a short presentation of the artist or collective, a statement of intent describing the proposed project, examples of previous work, any technical or spatial requirements, and an indication of the preferred period between September 2026 and the end of March 2027. Practical details, the submission deadline and the address for applications will be specified when the official call is published. We invite applicants to propose projects that open up a sensitive, critical and collective space for thinking about what it means today to find, lose or reinvent stability.

For more information about the participation terms and conditions:

Contacts:

Past events

Artist-in-Community

The Living Room offers an artist-in-community program: In it, local and international BIPOC artists or collectives enter into an honest conversation with the Living Room, with communities and the neighborhood.

Participatory research and other creative formats open up new aesthetic and critical perspectives on migration, anti-racism and decoloniality. Community Arts and Social Arts approaches are used to invent new relationships, communities and public spaces.

Diaspora University

The diaspora is a multi-voiced community with a lot of knowledge about Switzerland, about migration and racism, about politics, community and art. Asia Diaspora discussion and exchange meetings are currently held at irregular intervals (see the events calendar).

DIASPORA UNIVERSITY provides an open, cultural platform to express and share this knowledge as well as unheard stories, little known images and sounds. Film screenings, jukebox, lectures, political discussions, performances or simply discuss, play, remember, drink, be silent, laugh together.

Anticafé

Open on Fridays from 10 am to 3 pm.

Every Friday, the Living Room is open as a work space, social meeting place and to linger, without focusing on consumption.

People help themselves to food and drinkor can bring their own food to warm up. We offer drinks, food, outlets for charging devices, WLAN and workspace.

Donation is voluntary, suggested Fr. 5.-

The Living Archive is a place for everyone, a place of learning, unlearning and encounter. A public archive that collects intersectional, decolonial, and power-critical media in various languages, selected and written primarily by Black people and people of color. A place for discussion and self-reflection, in order to bring new perspectives to local resistance. The Living Archive consists of analog and digital media.

There are children's books, novels, poetry, non-fiction, (auto)biographies, magazines, films and a documentation archive of resistance (consisting of flyers, posters, etc.). For borrowing media, we need your name and phone number.