Come to the table! - Festivals as Spaces for New Ideas
The Long Tables are to inspire public debate around contemporary issues of our time seeing festivals as spaces to spark new ideas or to revive old forgotten ideas. They take place within a series of Long Tables organized by The Festival Academy with previous editions at the Global Artivism convening in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil in November 2025 and at Theater der Welt Festival in Chemnitz, Germany in June 2026.
The Long Table is a performance. Inspired by the intimacy of a shared dinner table. The format is conceived by Lois Weaver in 2003 in response to the divided nature of conventional panel discussions. The Long Table is an open format and everyone is invited to contribute on equal terms.
Rawabet Long Table
Long Table organised by The Festival Academy in collaboration with Ettijahat in the framework of Rawabet Festival.
Join our Long Table on 7 November from 4 to 5.30 pm at Wiels!
With Alia Alzougbi (Artistic Director & CEO Shubbak Festival London), Karen El Haddad and Makram Al Halabi (co-founders Mirsat Brussels), Aymen Gharbi (Artistic Director See Djerba Tunis) and many more.
This Long Table will kick off the conversation with a provocation related to the following questions: 'Can art festivals foster new ideas and be the bedrocks of transformative action, or are they inevitably complicit in reinforcing existing power relations and world orders/the status quo? '
Rawabet Festivals
Four festivals designed around themes of migration, mobility and visibility, and implemented in Berlin, Genoa, Oslo, and Brussels. The festivals include a rich and diverse programme of performance art, music, and multidisciplinary creations by new and emerging artists based in Europe, as well as select projects which have participated in the Rawabet Residencies and have received production grants.
The concluding festival is taking place in Brussels from 5-7 November 2026.
Link to Rawabet Festival 2026. Program here.
Reserve here! This event is part of global artivism month.
Proximamente Festival Long Table
The Festival Academy, Mirsat, Proximanente Festival and Ru'qah invite your to a special edition of the Long Table.
Join our Long Table on 17 November from 11 am to 12.30 pm at Ru'qah!
This Long Table will kick off the conversation with a provocation related to 'Myths, Displacement and Shared Histories'. Bringing together voices from SWANA and Latin American diasporic communities, this edition explores how migration, memory, and cultural narratives shape identities and communities. Through dialogue and storytelling, participants will reflect on displacement, belonging, resistance, and cultural transmission while discovering connections across shared histories.
From 17 to 21 November 2026, Próximamente Festival returns to KVS. The 2026 edition unfolds in a world burdened by structural violence, destruction, and the return of old oppression logic in new disguises. Democracy, human rights, ecology and the arts are no longer self-evident, unambiguous concepts, but fragile territories under constant pressure.
Link to Proximamente Festival 2026. Link to the Long Table.
Reserve here! This event is part of global artivism month.