Annual Theme

Introduction

Building together: art and humanitarianism face the challenges of collective action

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum's 2025 explores co-construction for it’s 2025 thematic cycle. Faced with the intensification of conflicts and natural disasters, and growing pressure on the humanitarian sector, we offer a series of discussions and workshops on aid and solidarity practices, through the lens of co-construction. This approach, which encourages active and egalitarian collaboration between humanitarians and local communities, also inspires the cultural sector. Through this series of events, we will explore how art and humanitarianism can intersect to transform their respective practices and encourage collective creation. Conferences, workshops and visits will provide opportunities to question power relations in these sectors and promote more inclusive practices. These events also mark the launch of the participatory overhaul of the Museum's permanent exhibition, planned for 2028, the occasion of its 40th anniversary and the 200th anniversary of Henry Dunant's birth.

Mathieu Menghini | Historian and theorist of cultural action

Formerly the director of theaters (in Neuchâtel, Geneva, and Valais) and a columnist for Espace 2, Mathieu Menghini works as a historian, theorist, and practitioner of cultural action at the Haute École de Travail Social in Geneva, at La Manufacture in Lausanne, and also in Lyon and Paris.

He is also the founder of the popular university La Marmite, dramaturgical advisor at La Colline in Paris, a columnist for Le Courrier, a member of the editorial board of the French journal Cause commune, and an expert in public cultural policies (including the new Comédie de Genève, La Chaux-de-Fonds – Swiss Cultural Capital, Théâtre du Jura, fOrum culture, Réseau Tinguely in Veveyse, etc.).

In 2019, he was awarded the Leenaards Cultural Prize.

Valérie Gorin | Consultant

Valérie Gorin is Head of Learning at the Geneva Center of Humanitarian Studies. She is also a Senior Lecturer at the University of Neuchâtel. She was previously invited professor at SciencesPo Lille, visiting scholar at Carleton University in Ottawa and a Senior Researcher of the Swiss National Foundation at the University of Lausanne.

Her areas of research focus on the visual culture and history of humanitarianism, humanitarian communication, media crisis reporting, and photojournalism. She has published extensively on photojournalism, visual culture and advocacy in Digital Journalism (2015), the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (2017), Humanitarianism and the Media, 1900-2015 (Berghahn Books, 2018). She also co-edited special issues about the responses to famine (European Review of History, 2015), the representations of migration (Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies, 2018), humanitarian advocacy (Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 2021) as well as images and emotions (with B. Edgar and D. Martin Moruno) Making Humanitarian Crises: Emotions and Images in History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).