Stand with Slovakia's cultural centres: they are fighting to survive!
What happened
For more than thirty years, independent cultural centres across Slovakia have done something quietly extraordinary: they have taken neglected, overlooked, and sometimes forgotten spaces and turned them into laboratories of contemporary art, civic debate, and community life: open to everyone, sustained by conviction rather than profit.
Today, thirty-three of those centres are fighting to survive.
At the end of 2025, the Slovak state effectively cut the Anténa network off from public funding. With support from the Slovak Arts Council, the thirty-three centres that make up the network (among them Trans Europe Halles members such as A4, Malý Berlín, Tabačka Kulturfabrik, Stanica Žilina-Záriečie, and Nová Cvernovka) had together organised more than 5,600 events attended by over 280,000 people. In 2026, that support is now gone.
We know what is happening here. These centres were cut off because they had the courage to remain free: free from political alignment, free from commercial pressure, free to host the kind of critical thinking and civic engagement that independent culture makes possible. This is a pattern we have seen before, across Europe. It must be resisted.
What is being lost
The cultural centres are places where artists develop work that could not exist anywhere else, where communities find spaces that genuinely belong to them, where citizens speak out, experiment and innovate. Without systemic support, many of these centres now face the prospect of closing their doors, cancelling programmes, and losing the people who have built them over decades.
How you can help
Anténa has launched the large public fundraising campaign.
Over EUR 141,000 has already been raised toward a EUR 500,000 goal, supported by nearly 3,000 donors.
Every contribution goes directly to the centres that need it most, distributed in solidarity across the network: covering basic operations, essential staff, and the community programming that makes these spaces what they are.
This is a direct way to act. Trans Europe Halles stands with every member of the Anténa network, and we invite you to stand with them too.
