When we talk about the ASSEMBLE partnership, we often start with the most urgent fact: displaced artists need support. But there is a longer story here — one about a city in Cyprus with a deep memory of displacement, an organisation that has spent years building bridges between Europe and the Middle East, and an ambitious vision for what European culture can be by 2030.

Understanding that story helps explain why ASSEMBLE exists, and what it is actually building towards.

D6:EU — Culture as a Response to Crisis

D6:EU is a visual arts organisation based in Cyprus. It is the sister organisation of D6 Culture in Transit in the United Kingdom, and together they form one of the more distinctive partnerships in European cultural life — a trans-European body with deep roots in the Eastern Mediterranean.

D6:EU works at the intersection of arts practice and social and environmental justice. Their collaborators span Cyprus, Spain, Greece, Italy, France, Turkey, Jordan, Ukraine, and the UK. What holds the network together is a shared commitment: that the arts have a specific, irreplaceable role to play in the most pressing questions of our time — the climate emergency, displacement, colonial legacies, and the fragility of communities under pressure.

Their recent projects include Contested Desires: Environmental Impact and Cultural Response, a Creative Europe-funded programme exploring ecological crisis through transnational artistic collaboration, and MATCH, a Mediterranean residency programme connecting artists across five countries to community responses to the climate crisis.

In short, D6:EU does not treat culture as decoration. They treat it as a tool for understanding what is happening to us — and for imagining something better.

ASSEMBLE fits precisely within that vision. It was D6:EU who initiated the consortium, brought the partners together, and developed the fellowship model. They are the project coordinator because this is the kind of work they have been building towards for years.

Larnaca 2030 — A City With Its Own Story of Displacement

In December 2025, Larnaca was selected as Cyprus’s European Capital of Culture for 2030, joining Leuven in Belgium and Nikšić in Montenegro. It is only the second Cypriot city to hold the title, after Pafos in 2017.

Larnaca is not an obvious choice to the outside eye. It is not Cyprus’s largest city. But it carries something that shaped the entire bid: a profound, lived experience of displacement.

After the conflict of 1974, Larnaca received tens of thousands of Greek Cypriot refugees from the north of the island. The city was transformed. Communities were rebuilt from loss. That history is still present — in families, in architecture, in the particular way the city understands what it means to be forced from home and to begin again somewhere else.

This is why Larnaca’s entire Capital of Culture bid is built around the concept of “Common Ground”. The theme is not abstract. It comes from the city’s bones.

What “Common Ground” Actually Means

The Larnaka 2030 programme describes its vision as bringing back anthropia — shared, fundamental human values — to the centre of cultural life. It imagines Larnaca as “a living laboratory, a place where Europe can be reimagined as a space of togetherness, as a democracy of care.”

The programme runs from 2026 to 2030, with a budget of €27 million. Key initiatives include a Co-Creators Network of thematic working groups focused on equality, inclusion, and youth; Herstories, a €900,000 programme on women’s and queer narratives; and a flagship infrastructure project — the Home of Memory — a dedicated space for the histories of displacement and refugee experience that have shaped Larnaca.

New bridges between Europe and the Middle East are a central ambition. So is a commitment to bicommunal collaboration — connecting the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities across the island’s still-divided landscape.

The Connection to ASSEMBLE

D6:EU is not simply a Larnaca-based organisation that happens to run ASSEMBLE. They are formally connected to the Larnaka 2030 programme — collaborating partners in the Contested Desires programme, which is supported by both the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture and Larnaka 2030 itself. Larnaka 2030 is listed as an associated partner of ASSEMBLE.

The alignment between ASSEMBLE and Larnaka 2030 is, in other words, deliberate and structural.

ASSEMBLE’s fellowship for displaced artists and curators — working across the themes of climate emergency and forced migration — speaks directly to what Larnaka 2030 is trying to build. The transnational residency model, the creative connections between Ukrainian, Spanish, Belgian, and Cypriot practitioners, the commitment to platform-building that outlasts the project: these are exactly the kinds of relationships and creative outcomes that Larnaka 2030 needs to draw on as 2030 approaches.

For D6:EU, ASSEMBLE is an investment in that future. By the time the Capital of Culture year begins, they will have completed a full cycle of transnational fellowships, established trust with partners across four countries, and created a working network of displaced artists with documented creative practice and European institutional relationships.