Multi-voicedness
In 2025 Flanders Arts Institute is launching a three-year project on multi-voicedness in the arts. During this period, we will work together with (hands-on) experts and committed artists, citizens and organisations – inside and outside the arts field – to develop tools to achieve a multi-voiced arts field.
Multi-voicedness requires an active commitment to amplify voices that remain underexposed to this day, and it assumes going beyond the single stories – the narratives that foster stereotyping and framing. That commitment is about discovering the mechanisms that exclude, and how different causes of exclusion influence each other (also known as intersectionality).
With multi-voicedness, we see meaningfulness as a collective process that takes the difference – and not the standard – as its starting point and enriches the arts, encouraging active participation in society.
Diversity
Flemish Minister of Culture Caroline Gennez talks in her policy note about art as ‘food and drink for the soul’. But who is art and culture for? Multi-voicedness starts with the realisation that our own frames of reference are not a standard that applies to everyone. It means making room for all voices, including those that are considered deviant in the current system, that chafe or challenge us. Different perspectives are given an equal place, safely and respectfully.
That’s why multi-voicedness is not the same as diversity, which is a social fact. And it is not the same as inclusion, where a standard is still assumed which is then made accessible to many.
Interculturalisation
Among other things, Flanders Arts Institute supports practices in the arts. To do this, we do our best to guide the arts sector towards an integrated and transversal approach to interculturalisation. In line with our vision, we do this by (1) creating space for permanent interculturalisation in our own operations, (2) sharing and supporting knowledge and expertise, and (3) monitoring what is actually taking place in terms of interculturalisation.
