Common Stories :
Decentering

the scene

Mame-Fatou Niang, Hortense Archambault, Pankaj Tiwari, Emmanuel Ndefo & Safia Kessas

Common Stories: a unique and utopian collective adventure comes to an end after three years of an odyssey across Europe and the African continent. This innovative European project, led by MC93, brings us together today at Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles, one of its partners, to question, challenge, and reinvent what diversity, identity, and belonging mean in contemporary Europe.

This is the essential place where theory meets practice, where academic rigor collides with artistic urgency, where the invisible becomes central.

For three years, Common Stories has gathered each year eight to nine emerging artists through its traveling program CommonLAB, moving through institutions from MC93 in Bobigny to Riksteatern in Stockholm, from Africologne in Cologne to Alkantara and Culturgest in Lisbon. The project confronted a fundamental question: how can European performing arts institutions—spaces of representation par excellence—reflect the profound social and cultural transformations reshaping our continent when stages, audiences, and institutional teams remain homogeneous? This conference marks both an ending and a beginning: a moment to reflect on what we have learned while opening new pathways ahead.

Themes

The demographic reality of Europe has surpassed its cultural imagination. While political discourse frames migration and otherness as “problems” to be managed, our stages remain remarkably white, our institutional leadership homogeneous, our programming timid. Common Stories emerged from the recognition that the performing arts must not only reflect and represent our European societies but also actively shape fairer, more plural, more livable futures.

Institutional “disruption”: How can European cultural institutions move beyond tokenism to truly share power with artists and communities historically excluded? What structural changes—in recruitment, programming, resource allocation, decision-making—are non-negotiable?

The violence of universalism: How does the myth of “universal” art and culture perpetuate exclusion? What happens when whiteness, heteronormativity, or masculinity are named, when Eurocentrism is challenged, when knowledge from the margins is centered? 

Bodies, space, and visibility: How do urban architecture, institutional aesthetics, and performance spaces themselves encode the stories that matter? What does it mean to give life to dominated bodies, to make the invisible visible—who decides?
How can we support artists who mobilize rituals and forms deemed unreadable by traditional criticism? Who does art belong to?

The European question: What futures can we imagine for a European project increasingly threatened by xenophobia, nationalism, and the instrumentalization of “diversity” as a political scapegoat? How do the performing arts contribute to building solidarities across differences?