Our insurrection will not be televised

https://www.neme.org/texts/our-insurrection-will-not-be-televised

On 18-19 April 2026, NeMe has organised the COST funded Training School “Decentralised networks of care“ which focused on the “numerous challenges, including funding constraints, competition for resources, and changing audience demographics,” and how cultural NGO workers are considered in many countries as “hobbyists with their work not sufficiently recognised as a vital part of the economy and societal health.” On May 25, and June 10 2026, I delivered variations of a talk outlining the activism we have been doing since 2020, and the theory that informs it. The first was for the COST funded Training School, “Subversive, Investigative, and Open Source Practices“ at the University of Galway which was co-organised by the University of Galway, Sheffield Hallam University, and NeMe; and the second was at the “Ask Pay Trust“ conference in Larnaca, which was organised by D6:EU.

Encouraged by friends, I have decided to write about this topic in the hope of reaching a wider audience and improving understanding of the chronic issues faced by NGOs in Cyprus. For this text, I have updated some charts and included information from audience feedback after the talks.

Glossary

For clarity, and to avoid misinterpretation, I’m stipulating some terms and definitions as I mean them in this text and/or diagrams.

Collectors

Local collectors who buy artworks for decorating their spaces, and/or support the commercial gallery or an artist they know.

Emerging artists

Artists or collectives of any discipline, age, or stage of their careers who can not survive purely by their art.

Established artists

Artists or collectives of any discipline, or age who survive by the sales and/or presentation of their art.

Fine arts

The term is used as defined by the Cyprus Deputy Ministry of Culture funding programme. It includes, fine artists, media artists, video artists, performance artists, architects, graphic designers, product designers, ceramists, and photographers.

Investors

Major international art collectors.

NGOs

Non Government Organisations. Registered non-profit, non-self-sustained, precarious cultural foundations, associations, and companies.

Introduction

Before I start I would like to briefly describe my perhaps naive understanding of the international visual arts scenes. I acknowledge that my views are empirical and biased, and, for the sake of avoiding unnecessary complexities, I am excluding from these equilibriums, the important work done by universities, art curators, critics, and historians.

Institutional art, monetises, quantifies, and/or weaponises artistic production that supports the established systems through cultural programmes and policies that align with governmental socio-political strategies. In contrast, the non-profits ethically engage with their communities.

My empirical understanding of the art world places NGOs in the middle of the top-down realities experienced by artists. On one end, there are the local museums, foundations, arts centres, commercial galleries, and the ad-hoc spaces utilised by the emerging artists to exhibit and sell their work to local collectors, on the other, there is a system that consists of established museums, foundations, biennials, auction houses, and established galleries, who together with investors in art, control the mainstream of the international circulation of established artists and their artworks. The majority of the artists are trapped in the doom cycle of their localities, and a small percentage circulate amongst what are considered as prestigious venues. ^{1Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, by Gregory Sholette, published by Pluto Press in 2010, offers a more scholarly and substantial analysis of the politics of visibility in the art world.}

Although not all NGOs are perceived equally, as not all have or want to seek opportunities for funding, networking, or research, some act as a bridge between these two worlds as they are the ones who are willing to take chances on supporting emerging artists but also include established artists in there projects. EU competitive funding schemes such as those of Creative Europe, Horizon, and COST, help NGOs with their networking, cross-national, collaborations, and outreach. I strongly believe that all cultural NGOs, whereas they are funded or not, are part of a very vibrant ecosystem, and in their totality create knowledge and appreciation for the arts.

Background

In 2016, three years after the bail-in of the Cypriot banks ^{2See en.wikipedia.org/wiki… %932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis} which virtually emptied accounts worth millions of euros, leaving only the guaranteed €100,000, the Department of Culture at the Ministry of Education and Culture in Cyprus changed the funding scheme for NGOs. This made our existence even more precarious. While the previous scheme had issues — for instance, it only offered 30% of project budgets, forcing NGOs to over-budget and seek in-kind contributions, which many people outside the locality or sector could not understand — the new scheme demanded matching sums that most NGOs have not yet been able to raise. This is because Cypriot law only allows tax exceptions for charities, a status that most non-profit cultural NGOs do not have. This predicament forces the founders or committees to donate money to their NGOs to meet the matching funds required for projects that have been approved for funding. This puts Cyprus in a unique position within the EU, as we have to pay for the privilege of working in the cultural sector.

Between 2016 and 2020 many NGOs have individually booked appointments with the then Director of the Culture Department, Pavlos Parakskevas, to express their frustration with the scheme. They were all welcomed with friendliness and humour but also a bureaucratic denial to understand any of the problems. On Paraskevas’ retirement from the department, and during the lockdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, I felt that the fine arts NGOs had no choice but to take collective action to remedy the situation.

Initially, the inspiration came from David Graeber who wrote that

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. ^{3David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Melville House, 2015.}

Our first collective meeting took place during one of the curfew windows during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was graciously hosted by Achilleas Kentonis at the ARTos House in Nicosia and consisted of one representative from each of the 40 active NGOs at the time. The terms for the first, and subsequent meetings are simple:

• 1 person per NGO
• All NGOs can present their suggestions on improvements to the policy.
  • Only suggestions without any objections are included.
  • No majority votes.
  • No concessions.
  • Complete consensus.
  • Abstains are allowed.
• All correspondence is open for collective editing.

Our first 6 page letter contained our suggestions and was co-edited and co-signed by 39 NGOs with the 40th writing their own letter to the Ministry stating that they are supporting its content as well. Our second letter, co-edited and co-signed by 93 cultural NGOs from all disciplines, targeted the exclusion of culture from the Vision 2030 government sponsored study. Many other letters followed.

Following the initial meeting, we formed a working group consisting of Efklides Papadopoulos, Christina Skarpari, Yiannis Toumazis, Argyro Toumazou and myself. On 4 July 2022, Yiannis Toumazis withdrew from the working group when he became the first Deputy Minister of the newly established Deputy Ministry of Culture (DMC). A few months later, Evagoras Vanezis joined the team. The working group does not make decisions, but rather coordinates efforts, writes the initial drafts of letters before opening them up for collective editing and discussion, and represents the fine arts NGOs at meetings that were previously held at the Cultural Services and, since 2022, at the DMC.

Early on we identified and distilled four major issues:

• The problem with policies is not only what they include, but also, what they leave out.
• The rules are made for us, without us. Cultural policies are currently like ill fitting shoes.
• Policies and regulations prevent the professionalisation of cultural workers.
• The rules quantify work over the workers.

Furthermore, we identified the following:

• Regulations do not respond to the needs of the ecosystem.
• NGOs create a massive invisible foundation for the arts scene, and its audiences in Cyprus, as they initiate about 90% of the cultural events in Cyprus.
• NGOs help in augmenting artists’ income.
• Number of non-profit cultural organisations is increasing annually.
• Working conditions for cultural workers should be improved created.
• Solving problems requires radical solutions.

Our strategy drew from Michel Foucault who stated that

Bringing out the conditions of acceptability of a system and following the lines of rupture that mark its emergence are two correlative operations. ^{4Foucault, cited in Reiner Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself as an Anarchistic Subject,” in Tomorrow the Manifold: Essays on Foucault, Anarchy and the Singularization to Come, ed. Malte Fabian Rauch and Nicolas Schneider, Diaphanes, 2019.}

For us, this meant engaging with the mapping of norms and rules that allow the system to appear stable, as well as tracing fault lines and contradictions that reveal moments of breakdown, where the system fails or shifts.

Our approach follows some simple ethical principles:

• Unmask power and confront it.
• Collectivity gives us a space in which to constitute new possibilities of participating in the democratic processes.
• Avoid the trap of our own subjectivities.
• Agonise, do not antagonise.
• Tactical pursuit towards bilaterally beneficial changes.

Numbers do not lie, people do

As boring as numbers may appear, they do matter when it comes to the sustainability of the non-profit cultural sector. Statistics themselves don’t lie, but they can be misused, misinterpreted, or presented in misleading ways. The numbers are neutral; it’s how they are collected, analysed, and communicated that can create false impressions.

A chart showing the Government expenditure on culture found in the Eurostats website circulated in the social media in 2020 boldly demonstrated that the Republic of Cyprus ranked second last in the EU regarding money allocated to culture. The Cyprus ranking in 2025, the latest year that statistical information is available, has not changed.

But what do these numbers mean? Cyprus government spends 0.439465% of its GDP on culture. This indeed appears like a very low number considering that the EU target is 1%, and Malta, one of the few EU countries smaller than Cyprus, ranks as number one by allocating 2.605121% of its GDP on culture!

Admittedly, for the past 6 years, the cultural sector had a fixation on the rounded 0.44 percentage, and none of us tried to translate that in actual euros. According to Eurostat, the Cyprus GDP is estimated to be €35,177,153,500 from which 0.44% is allocated to culture which translates to €154,603,590. Interestingly only €8,900,000 is confirmed to be used for partially funding the whole of the non-profit cultural sector, libraries, cinema productions, monument commissions, and independent artists.

After my talk in Larnaca, a person from the DMC approached me and stated that the Deputy Ministry only receives about €50,000,000 annually which lets me wonder who is lying and who is telling the truth.

The interpretations we are left with are:

1. The DMC receives more than they claim to us.
2. The government spends over two thirds (67.6566%) of the cultural budget on entertainment, or on other non-cultural projects.
3. The funds allocated to the DMC are the only funds allocated to culture and the government gives false information to the EU.

Whatever the case might be, somebody is keeping the truth away from us, and maybe, from the DMC too! I believe that the percentages to the GDP had very small variations since Cyprus joined the EU which means that Options 2 or 3 are the ones I would place a calculated bet on, and that the responsibility for this, spans many governments.

There is some evidence documented in mainstream news outlets that mention that the refurbishment of the cafeteria of the Cyprus parliament used part of the budget from the artwork commissions to pay for the renovations and the purchase of furniture reported in mainstream media to support option 2.

If option 3 is correct Cyprus ranks last in the government expenditure on culture in the EU, and the numbers supplied to Eurostat by our government are false. In such case the actual percentage of Government expenditure on culture is 0.1421% which places Cyprus at the bottom end of the EU, with less than half to what Greece allocates.

Beyond the low budgets available to cultural producers in the funding, the system defines what is considered rational, normal, legal, or real, while labelling the perspectives of the NGOs as irrational, emotional, or non-legal. The system as such, maintains a self-serving monopoly on truth and exploits our dependence by organising annual gladiatorial competitions for the funding it offers.

The system is opaque, hides behind the regulations it created, and denies organisations access to the official reality. This essentially denies the full ontological status of NGOs, and their right to exist as full cultural subjects, by creating a cultural us versus them order where the organisations are treated as objects to be managed rather than subjects who can lead, because they are deemed superfluous, or peripheral by the hegemonic order.

Options

The centralised funding system to which NGOs and artists are subjected has created many unforeseen problems. It seems to me that some of the current DMC administration’s changes to the regulations, led by Deputy Minister Vasiliki Kassianidou and Director of the Contemporary Culture Department Ioanna Hadjicosti, were made to restrict access to funding. This has resulted in a significant reduction in the number of approved fine arts projects. While 86.96% of submitted projects were approved in 2021, this figure dropped to 39.73% in 2025, and then to just 37.72% in 2026.

Every year sees the creation of additional cultural NGOs, most of which are artists run. In fine arts alone, my list of NGOs was expanded from 40 in 2020, to 50 in 2025, which amounts to 25% increase in 5 years. This is objectively understandable because artists are trying to compete for access to the funding, which basically remained unchanged.

Solving such problems requires radical solutions. The options below have not been discussed in depth with most of the other NGOs but it is my opinion that unless we think radically, the situation will definitely worsen.

Option 1

The first option is to remain as we are. This, in my opinion, is no longer sustainable, although it does its own advantages. It gives NGOs their own agency, control, and freedom to select their own paths. It also creates a polyphony in the arts scene which is also a disadvantage as we do not only compete for the funding, but also for the audiences.

Advantages

• Polyphony
• Failure/closure of any organisation has minimum effect
• Organisations have little say on policy unless they remain united

Disadvantages

• Precarity of organisations
• Cultural noise
• This is our current situation

Option 2: Merging of similar NGOs

The merging of similar NGOs may expand audiences, and make the resulting NGO stronger. For example, NGOs who specialise in exhibiting Cypriot contemporary artists could merge. Another example could be that an NGO that specialises in professional projects, could merge with another one that specialises in workshops for amateurs.

Advantages

• Sustainability of organisations
• Merge similar cultural organisations
• Strengthening organisations
• Merging of audiences
• Reduction in the number of organisations
• Slices of the funding pie may become bigger

Disadvantages

• Forging mergers may not work
• Erasure of histories

Option 3: Merging of complementary organisations

The merging of complementary organisations was inspired by the current war in Iran, where the killing of Grand Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei by the US had minimal implications for the country as a whole, since it favours decentralised, self-governing hierarchies at regional level. The strategic merging of complementary organisations should boost the sustainability of NGOs.

Advantages

• Sustainability of culture
• Strengthening of organisations
• Merging of audiences
• Self reliance
• Sustainability of organisations

Disadvantages

• Forging mergers may not work
• Erasure of histories

Conclusion

In 1988 Donna Haraway wrote in an essay titled “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” that

[…] situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective knowledge.’ ^{5“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” originally published in the journal Feminist Studies, Volume 14, Issue 3, 1988.}

Within her essay, she argued that knowledge production is a relational process and has a shared agency whereas true objectivity is not a view from nowhere, or a view from above, or what she calls a “god-trick,” but a situated perspective that acknowledges limited location and encourages accountability. Situated knowledges are about communities, not isolated individuals, requiring the joining of partial views to form a collective position that fosters solidarity and critical inquiry. As such there is no single truth, but a mosaic of different points of view.

In Cyprus, quantifiable work is valued more than the precarity of the people who do it, and every year more bureaucratic responsibilities are added to the funding schemes. NGOs, and the cultural workers within them, are treated as non-institutional actors, and the system imposes upon us a particular function and destiny which forces us to voluntary servitude, an elective submission to power, in order to survive. We are, and have been asking is to participate, in the meta-institutional operations of the drafting of the policies in order to include essential and long overdue, mutually beneficial, updates and changes.

Our work is not seeking to get rid of institutions, as this would lead to their replacement with other institutions, but rather, to create the legal and economic frameworks for our autonomy, and reduce our dependency from a system that exerts its power upon us. We have a need and a right to reach our potentialities, move on from what we are made to be, and reach what we are capable of becoming. More precisely, our work is not extra- or anti-institutional, but aims to create transparent frameworks and conditions on how we can gain recognition as para-institutional, infrastructural, autonomous, and beneficial organisations. Our objective is to open a sustainable space of contingency in which new practices, discourses, networks, and projects can emerge freely, and funded properly.

To date we have failed to achieve most of our aims but we will “Try again. Fail again. Fail better“ ^{6Samuel Beckett. “Worstward Ho,” published in Nohow On, John Calder, 1989.} as “failure is more beautiful than success.“ ^{7John Fante. Ask the Dust, Stackpole Sons, 1939.}

Notes

1. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, by Gregory Sholette, published by Pluto Press in 2010, offers a more scholarly and substantial analysis of the politics of visibility in the art world. ⇧
2. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki… %932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis ⇧
3. David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Melville House, 2015. ⇧
4. Foucault, cited in Reiner Schürmann, “On Constituting Oneself as an Anarchistic Subject,” in Tomorrow the Manifold: Essays on Foucault, Anarchy and the Singularization to Come, ed. Malte Fabian Rauch and Nicolas Schneider, Diaphanes, 2019. ⇧
5. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” originally published in the journal Feminist Studies, Volume 14, Issue 3, 1988. ⇧
6. Samuel Beckett. “Worstward Ho,” published in Nohow On, John Calder, 1989. ⇧
7. John Fante. Ask the Dust, Stackpole Sons, 1939. ⇧

Yiannis Colakides is an architect, cultural organiser, active curator and editor in the fields of digital art and technology. He co-founded the non-profit NGO NeMe with Helene Black.

Among other books, he co-edited State Machines: Reflections and Actions at the Edge of Digital Citizenship, Finance, and Art (Institute of Network Cultures, 2019), Frankenstein Reanimated: Creation & Technology in the 21st Century (Torque editions, 2022), and A sea change: Political, Natural, and Cultural Ecologies of the Mediterranean (Quo Artis, 2024).