A question for every edition

Between Memory and Identity: Introspections

Our 2025 exhibition carried a special significance: it marked the transition of Art Initiatives into a formal association. What began as a project to raise funds and awareness had grown into a community, built on intercultural dialogue, on looking at one another with curiosity rather than judgment, and on supporting one another with empathy.

Questions of memory and identity have become urgent, especially for younger generations. The pressure to define and display the self has never been louder, yet the more rigid a definition of identity becomes, the more it risks deepening divisions instead of opening dialogue. Susan Sontag saw memory not as a fixed archive but as a partial, refracted construction, and identity, like art, as something to be understood in relation to others. The exhibition explored four poles, individual and collective identity, and individual and collective memory, and how they influence one another.

The works staged memory and identity not as fixed truths but as processes. Luis West’s Ibiza Sunrise Pill turned a shared Balearic dawn into a private vessel of memory. Eglė Otto’s Jeanne d’Arc fractured a historical icon into lace, armour and flame. Louis Wessendorff’s Where did it turn? staged identity’s quiet collapse, while Sarice Brudet and Conxi Sane turned fragility and trauma into renewal. Raphaële Bidault-Waddington and Amélie von Heydebreck explored the unseen and the radiant, Jean Willi and Stephan Crasneanscki gave resonance to history and absence, and Phrank’s Cocoon Clubbers captured memory at its most collective.

Together they spoke to one idea that also guides Art Initiatives: memory and identity are not fixed possessions, but processes of encounter, loss, transformation and openness. The 2025 auction supported Anno’s One Fine Day and Asperger Ibiza y Formentera.

See works from past editions

Negotiating Belonging

Negotiating Belonging explores how our sense of identity is shaped by the forces, histories and environments that surround us. Where we belong – and where we are allowed, expected or able to belong – is never determined by the individual alone. Geography, history, politics, migration, cultural inheritance, gender, social structures and the communities we encounter all participate in defining our place within the world.

The exhibition begins from the understanding that belonging is neither fixed nor necessarily given. It can be inherited through family, culture and memory, but it can equally be interrupted by war, displacement or changing borders. It can emerge through arriving somewhere new and gradually becoming part of a community, or through living between different cultural realities without reducing oneself to a single origin. Belonging can provide continuity and security, but it can also become a system of expectation: prescribing the roles we are asked to inhabit, determining who is recognised and heard, or establishing boundaries between those considered inside and those left outside.

Across painting, sculpture and textile-based practices, the participating artists approach these negotiations from distinctly different positions. The body becomes a site upon which histories and social expectations are inscribed; the home becomes a space of intimacy, care and recognition; inherited knowledge connects generations; borders regulate movement and access; cultural hybridity challenges fixed definitions of origin; and community itself emerges as something that must continually be created through participation, coexistence and exchange.

Several works ask what happens when these structures are disrupted. When does a person become out of place, and who determines where they should belong? What happens when securing one’s own position requires pushing somebody else aside? What does it mean to be physically present within a community while remaining unheard or unrecognised? And what happens to our ability to belong to one another when even our perception of a shared reality begins to diverge?

Other works turn towards time, memory and inheritance. They consider what we carry from those who came before us, how histories of displacement or violence can become embedded within identity, and how traditions and cultural knowledge survive by being continuously reinterpreted rather than simply preserved. In this sense, belonging is not only about where we are, but about what we carry with us – and how those inherited experiences meet the places, people and realities we encounter.

Negotiating Belonging ultimately proposes identity as an ongoing relationship between the self and the world around it. We shape the places and communities we enter, just as they shape us. Through movement, encounter, rupture, inheritance and exchange, our understanding of where we belong is continually challenged and reconstructed. Belonging therefore becomes less a permanent state than a continuous negotiation – between where we come from, the structures that surround us, the people with whom we share our lives, and who we are becoming.

The 2026 catalogue The event