Common Ground. Letters from Europe
Europe is less solid ground than a collective question. Common Ground. Letters from Europe inquires into what we share, what we lose, what we can claim, and what we must continue renegotiating. To this purpose, Letters from Europe presents an epistolary form that is personal, polyphonic, and open-ended. EMOP Berlin 2027 serves as an invitation to contribute, through images, to the ongoing narrative of a shared European space.
With Common Ground, EMOP Berlin 2027 homes in on the conditions for this commonality. Where do we experience forms of togetherness? When do they become fragile, and when must they be recalibrated? And what role can photographic images play in allowing us not only to see a shared space, but also imagine it? For a festival that carries the European dimension in its title, this thematic focus also stands for a return to its own programmatic and conceptual foundations.
Common Ground regards commonality not as a given or stable identity, but as a fragile, critical aspiration that needs to be renegotiated on a continuous basis. Its attention is directed toward places, situations, and relationships in which proximity, responsibility, solidarity, and mutual interdependence are articulated—as well as toward moments in which exclusion, tension, and the fault lines in society become visible. Europe emerges not merely as a geographical, historical, or administrative entity, but as an unfinished project of coexistence: a promise that must continually prove itself in everyday life, in social relations, in cultural practices, and in the images and languages we create of and with one another.
In this vein, photography is not to be understood solely as a documentary medium, but also as a space of imagination. It can make relationships visible, render proximity and distance tangible, bear witness, and entertain the question of what makes living together possible. Particularly in light of Europe’s conflict-ridden past and present, the aim is not to arrive at definitive images or simple narratives, but to engage with ruptures, differences, memories, and responsibilities.
The second part of the title deepens this inquiry by giving it a form: Letters from Europe invokes the letter as a mode of communication that is personally addressed, and yet open-ended. Letters can report, contradict, remind, warn, hope, establish closeness, or voice difference. In this sense, the guiding theme also asks what messages, images, and alternative visions can be articulated from Europe today—and to whom they are directed.
With Common Ground. Letters from Europe, EMOP Berlin 2027 invites museums, exhibition venues, public and private galleries, project spaces, universities, and art schools to contribute exhibition projects related to the festival theme. At the heart of the festival are photographic works that explore Europe as a shared and fragile space of experience that calls for an ongoing renegotiation that is at once critical and ambiguous, documentary and poetic. Each participating exhibition can thus be understood as a visual missive: a contribution to the question of how a common European space can become visible, conceivable, and malleable today