There is a particular kind of difficulty that comes with being an artist in a place the world has decided to ignore — or worse, has decided is too dangerous, too complicated, too politically inconvenient to engage with. Borders close. Visas are denied. Networks dissolve. The infrastructure that makes artistic practice possible quietly disappears.

Moving Artists was built precisely to push back against that.

Who They Are

Moving Artists (MA) is an independent, artist-run, non-profit organisation based in Bilbao, in the Basque Country of Spain. They work at the intersection of human rights and the arts, and their founding purpose is unusually specific: to facilitate mobility and cultural exchange between countries that have restricted access to one another.

This is not a residency programme in the conventional sense. Moving Artists does not simply invite international artists to spend time in Spain. They focus on creating channels of exchange with countries and communities where cultural workers face genuine threats — conflict, isolation, censorship, instability, the slow erosion of conditions that make any kind of creative life possible. Their residency exchanges happen annually, between Bilbao and a selected partner country, and they are designed around the principle that movement itself is a form of solidarity.

At the heart of their approach is a recognition that many artists are not choosing displacement as an opportunity. They are surviving it. And when they are forced to flee — when intergenerational exchange is erased, when the immaterial fabric of cultural life is torn — something irreplaceable is lost. Moving Artists exists to keep those threads alive.

What They Actually Do

Each year, Moving Artists runs a residency exchange that brings cultural practitioners from a partner country to Bilbao, while also enabling Spanish artists to travel in the other direction. The exchange is genuinely reciprocal. Both sides learn. Both sides produce work. Both sides bring their communities into contact with realities that would otherwise remain invisible.

The residency is built around dialogue — with local communities in the Basque Country, with partner organisations in the exchange country, and between the artists themselves. Moving Artists describes this as creating “shared spaces of curiosity, collaboration, critical emancipatory thought and education.” In practice, it means artists working in contexts that are real rather than abstracted, with audiences and interlocutors who have their own urgent relationship to the questions being explored.

The Basque Country is not an incidental location for this kind of work. It is a region with its own complex history of cultural resistance, linguistic survival, and the political weight of identity under pressure. That history is present in Bilbao, and it creates a particular kind of resonance for artists coming from places where culture itself is under threat.

Why They Are Part of ASSEMBLE

Moving Artists brings to ASSEMBLE something that most European cultural organisations cannot offer: years of direct, practical experience working with artists from conflict zones, not as beneficiaries of charitable programmes, but as creative equals engaged in serious artistic exchange.

Within ASSEMBLE, Moving Artists hosts fellows in the Basque Country. This is not simply providing a desk and a studio — it is offering access to a network of communities, collaborators, and interlocutors that Moving Artists has spent years building. Fellows arriving in Bilbao enter an environment shaped by an organisation that understands, at an institutional and human level, what it means to work across the lines that conflict draws.

They also bring a specific philosophy that aligns closely with ASSEMBLE’s own values. Moving Artists does not treat displaced or at-risk artists as passive subjects in need of rescue. They treat them as practitioners with work to make, ideas to develop, and contributions to offer. That framing — of solidarity as mutual exchange rather than charity — is foundational to how ASSEMBLE approaches the fellowship as a whole.

ASSEMBLE brings together partners from Cyprus, Belgium, Ukraine, and Spain precisely because each brings a different, irreplaceable perspective on displacement, mobility, and cultural resilience. Moving Artists represents the perspective of an organisation that has been doing this specific work — opening routes where routes were closed — for years before ASSEMBLE existed.

Bilbao as a Site

The Basque Country has long occupied a distinctive place in European cultural geography. A region defined by its own language, its own cultural identity, and a history of navigating political complexity, it is a place where questions of cultural survival are not theoretical. Artists arriving through ASSEMBLE will find themselves in a city — Bilbao — that has its own experience of what it means to insist on culture as a form of resistance and continuity.

Moving Artists has made that history part of the fabric of their programme. The residency in Bilbao is not simply a neutral space. It is a place with its own story to tell, and its own reasons to listen carefully to the stories of others.