 Thanks for the invitation. I'm very glad to be here. It's a pleasure. My name is Khaled Werke. I'm originally from Syria. I'm born in Syria. I'm based in Berlin. I'm an artist. I studied art. I practice conceptual art, mainly at the moment. I'm not going to talk about my practice. I'm going to talk about co-culture, which is a new form of practice that I'm exploring. It's an institution I founded in 2015. I was living in Denmark. Then I moved to... Sorry, I have to keep the time up because... Yeah, I moved to 2015 with the so-called refugee crisis. I like all the time to emphasize calling it a European crisis because the refugee crisis was still happening since long time. Now we have 70 million refugees around the world. Now this is actually... I don't know if you know this phenomenon in trees. It's called crown shyness. It exists in two countries, in Kuala Lumpur and in Argentina. It's basically that the trees are unable to protect each other. They stop growing while they are still connected in the wood. This is how I think the Syrian society nowadays is... with the fact that they are divided or spread all over the world. I was thinking how we can reconnect this cultural fabric. How can we bring these people together? I thought of a project. It's really just because there's no time I'm going to skip so many things because I really would like to go over all the projects. I founded this project. It's called Syria Cultural Index. It's an online platform and mobile app that aims to map and connect the Syrian artistic community around the world, individuals and institutions, to counteract the discrementation of their identity, excuse my English, to reconnect the cultural fabric by bringing together artists who were forcefully displaced with those who remain in the country. So it will be kind of research tool. It will allow any third parties to understand the Syrian cultural scene where they are, what we do, how many we are. In this case, we will know exactly... we will end up with a database that will allow us to create new programs if we want to create something that will really help the cultural scene specifically not based on expectation but based on statistics. So the project is growing. It has several reasons why we are doing this, not only to reconnect and map the Syrian cultural scene but provide opportunities as well to the people. Sorry, really this time and the music, it's so pressuring. And then in this case, I thought that that might be a useful tool for any, as I said, for any government third parties to use it as well to support the cultural scene. So we created the project. Actually, I wrote the project proposal. I was planning to apply for fund. I met the deadline, a difficult artist. And then I ended up with the proposal. I posted it on Facebook. It reached someone. I tagged everyone on Facebook. It reached someone from Ford Foundation. They were generous to give us support to start the project. So we already did. And we received the money. The money was sent to us, but then it was blocked for quite a long time. For three, four months, we didn't know where the money is. Then we figured out the German bank, the corresponding bank of our bank, they blocked the money because the initiative has the word Syria or has member with Syrian background. It's pure discrimination. But we can't do anything. That's their right to do so. But that helps us actually to move forward and to change the name from one institution has one project to an institution has several projects. So we named the institution co-culture. Now co-culture has several projects. The index is one of the main projects. The other project is based on the results of the index or the data base. We will know who's living where. We'll know where the artists, what they are doing. That will allow us to create the Syrian Biennial. We never had the Syrian Pinale before. The idea is to create a Syrian Pinale that will follow the refugee route. So every addition will take place in a new country because Damascus used to be the capital culture of Syria. Then it shifted with its makers. So it becomes Beirut, then it becomes Istanbul, and now Berlin. What's happening in Berlin now is more important, I think, to what's happening in Syria, really in Damascus, because most of the people had to flee the war. How much time do we have? Okay, so another project we have is called Support the Supporters, which I like it a lot. So basically the concept of co-culture, instead of waiting institutions to create us initiatives, let's create the institution that create initiatives because no one will be able to understand our situation more than ourselves, right? So that project has several sub-projects. One of it is a Safe Heaven Fellowship. We are receiving every year a fellowship from different countries. This is the first edition. We have an amazing artist, a young female from Libya. She has her own organization in Libya, but then she had to flee because she was attacked by the militia because there was, in one event, two girls kissing. So anyway, I really invite you to check her and her work. She's really amazing, and now she's part of the co-culture team, and she will work with us. She will keep working with us as well in the future. So not only for one year, we also care for the future of the person. Another project is, oh, that was it. So that's the all. And the second project, I thought it's actually, it's a cool idea to have this idea of creating initiatives. And so what about the newcomers, the new artists who actually want to contribute to their community, but they don't know how, because the language, the system have saw so many things. So we thought to create this mentorship. So you come to us, we don't have money to give you, but we have the team. We have an amazing, amazing team, and all the time I say we because I'm just only the face of very amazing people working really hard. So we help professionalize your idea. We give you the infrastructure we have. And then we, our fundraiser try to find you fund as well to make your initiative, your idea and initiative that create projects. The third project is called Giving Spaces. Giving Spaces is a structure that based on, it's super adobe structure if you are familiar with it. It's based on American, in north of Syria we used to have this structure. And we have, there's American Iranian architect. His name is Nader Khalili, he passed away a few years ago. He developed something called Iqodom, where he used basically the plastic bag. He filled it with earth to build this kind of structure. So what we are doing now, we're inviting 20 artists and activists and architects from the region from the conflict zone to come to co-culture backyard. We have amazing space. I will show it to you in one second to build actually this, to learn how to build this structure, to go back to their community, to teach their community how to build this housing. And it's eco-friendly, it's sustainable, it's very cheap to build as well. It has many reasons. I will come back, maybe if there's enough time, I will come back to each project. The last project, which is the fourth project, it's called Makan. Makan in Arabic means space. We were lucky to get this amazing building just designed just recently by a very famous chairman, architect, Brandon Hoover, and it's located in our kind of immigrant area in Viding in Berlin. And we were lucky to have the event space. It's a very big event space. It's very big, it's very beautiful. So we want to have it as a safe space for our community, where we meet regularly, we have exhibitions, we have workshops, talks. Also we allow other institutions to exist as well, who have no spaces as well. So for example, if you have an institution, but you don't have a space, and you want to show your... use the space that we basically disappear as an institution, we give it to you for three days or one week per month. So you come, you don't see co-culture at all, you see Hamash or you see other institutions who work. And then also try to support their communities. At the same time, we have the business model we're creating. It's quite expensive actually to rent this space. So we rented out three entities, MyStudio co-culture. I have a business partner and then we rented out commercially for high rent to support our culture, to kind of sustain ourselves. Of course, we have also, all the time we have support from different funders. So now since this is kind of the brief so now I can I think talk a little bit more in details about the project if there's still time before, maybe there's few minutes. So with the Serial Cultural Index, I will just go back to the first project. As I said, it's an online platform. The idea is to help artists, also to give them the power to create and to decide even the future of this platform. So each profile members or each member will have a profile, they will have a share. So it will be owned by the artists themselves. It's a way of also democratizing the scene because in this way you can reach opportunities based on each person, their age, their location, their profession, etc. And the idea we are now at the moment mapping the visual art, the Syrian visual art then we want to shift it later to have it more for music, cinema, etc. And then we want to open and send it will cost fortunate amount of money to other nations in the conflict zone. So it will be a cultural index slash Libya, slash Yemen, etc. The concept is very simple. If we can't stay at home, let's carry on with us. Thank you so much.