CTM project #shares: 2025 Reflection Workshop in Riga

What is CTM project?

Cultural Transformation Movement (CTM) project is a context-based process to diversify artistic production and its destination starting from within the organisation. It is led by Trans Europe Halles with four of TEH members, Brunnenpassage from Austria, VIERNULVIER from Belgium, Zo centro culture contemporanee from Italy, IZOLYATSIA. Platform for Cultural Initiatives from Ukraine. With the Cultural Transformation Movement project, we are taking real steps, making genuine commitments and openly sharing experiences with the other TEH members about how to make social justice a priority in arts, culture and creative industries. Funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, the Cultural Transformation Movement project is designed for four years (2023-2027) and aims to transform the participating cultural organisations, so they include and reflect the full range of backgrounds and perspectives to be found in European society today.

What is Reflection Workshop?

Collective Reflection Workshop is an essential part of CTM project. Taking place twice a year: during TEH Annual Conference and TEH Camp Meeting, Reflection Workshop is facilitated by Laura Camacho Salgado, CTM Artistic Transformation Facilitator, and aims to provide a platform for CTM artists/agents-of-change (called #AoCs) from participating centers-of-change (called #CoCs) to meet together, reflect on their experiences with the local context and share their impressions, notes and major findings from the encounters with the local communities of the participating #CoCs in Italy, Belgium, Austria and Ukraine.

Reflection Workshop is a chance for #AoCs to learn from each other and develop collective approaches to proactively engage with the local context throughout the cultural transformation process towards social justice & across borders.

Reflection Workshop #6: What is data?

The question so simple and yet fundamental was the best framing for the workshop. It sparked a wide range of responses and reflections. Some participants instinctively associated data with numbers, attendance counts, or demographic statistics. Others considered data as qualitative observations, emotional responses, and relational signals.

• Is data different from knowledge? Is it opposed? Or is it the foundational building block of knowledge?
• Is data an apparatus of capitalism?
• Why is there the need of collecting more and more data? Should we need to forget instead?

The workshop’s aim was to broaden understanding of what counts as data, especially in cultural work where subtle, invisible, or relational phenomena are often overlooked. In other words; an invitation to re-thinking what counts as data.

For that reason Laura as the facilitator emphasized that data is not neutral: it is socially constructed, historically shaped, and carries the footprint of the history of colonizations. Traditional frameworks often reflect eurocentric or colonial legacies, reproducing inequities in whose voices are documented, remembered, and acted upon.

Curious to read the full report?