 Just by introduction to the next piece, it's called Letter from an Artist Anonymous. It's actually from an artist who we've worked with over several years now. And she's still, I would say, dealing with some of what Laurie would say is energy being used in the wrong direction. She's not able to travel because of international sanctions, so instead she wrote us all a letter. How to keep going. Before becoming an artist, I was one of the survivors in our illogical world. I survived drowning in a wild river in my childhood. A bad car accident when I was a teenager and lately 12 years of war and a destructive earthquake. Life forced me to stare at death and to realize that I am here for many reasons. The most important one is to overcome the fear of loss and accept that everything has a price and I have to pay it. Especially when it comes to my responsibility as an artist towards my community. This introduction is not about generating sympathy or showing heroism. It's about the shared need to decolonize the cultural sector, personally, institutionally, economically and politically. When you live under a dictatorship, it's ironic to talk about colonization. And most ironic for me is that my current conflict is not with my government. It's with some major transnational cultural funding institutions that, as they claim, are here to support me. These institutions adopt capitalist principles and bureaucratic practices that contradict the very goals that my artworks to achieve. I've been working for 24 years and I never had to deal with such a deep level of cultural inequality from funders as they did over the last two years. They treated me as if I am the one who needs them and I have to be thankful for their support and I have to obey everything they ask of me because they are obeying their governments and economic entities and so why don't I? Their priority was their own administrative bureaucracy, not the flexibility needed for artistic and cultural production, denying the very fact that funding institutions also need artists in order to justify their very existence. And just like any colonizing country, they didn't make any effort to investigate and understand the environment in which this artistic and cultural work was taking place. They asked me to follow their administrative bureaucratic rules, a process that could actually put my team in real physical danger and hold me to an immense responsibility that was beyond my control. And just like the local governmental institutions that I have never worked with when I made my decision to cancel the project, they finally started to listen to me and sought to negotiate around their own administrative process. Not because they believed in my work, but because they needed to spend the money their donor had given them. They started to talk about the effort they made to support artists in a third world country that was living under economic sanctions. It was not supportive at all. It was a trap that I will never put myself in again. Being independent in the cultural sector is not only about the source of financial resources. It's also about thinking out of the box about challenges and obstacles. It's about pointing out problems and finding creative ways to overcome them and sharing ideas related to the path of change with local international artists, societies and power. But what is currently happening is the opposite. Funders create obstacles and challenges without any real intention to make any changes and which actually reproduces the very cultural colonization that artists reject, struggle against and seek to change. The price we are paying for leading the cultural sector with capitalist principles is inequality and corruption. And it continues to happen without any signs of resistance from most arts institutions, because everybody wants to just keep going. But is it really about just keeping going? Or could it be about how we keep going?