Resilience is not just about surviving shocks. It’s about designing for aliveness. It’s about building cultural ecosystems that can not only withstand disruption but also offer healing, orientation, meaning and beauty when the world gets dark. 

During the event in Vienna I gave a keynote speech, and I’ll be honest. It wasn’t easy. Not because the content was difficult to write, but because the emotional reality behind the words felt raw and close. We’re living in strange times. To live is a strange experience. The older I get, the more bizarre it sometimes feels.

Existence comes with a long line of flux. There are constant changes to context, politics, and the ecological conditions of our time. All while we are fumbling our way forward through infinite cosmic questions. Why are we here? What is the point? How do we relate to it all? 

If that internal confusion wasn’t enough, the external world is spinning too. It can often feel as though instead of supporting us in our existential uncertainty, society as it stands today often makes things worse. Inequality, fear, injustice, endless productivity demands, collapsing ecosystems are difficult to handle, but those of us who live in relative peace and have food, shelter and freedom of speech carry a responsibility: to question, to reimagine, to act. We need to use it. 

During my address, I shared examples that I often return to. Joseph Beuys and his ‘Free International University’, founded in 1973, has always been for me a place of artistic and social exploration. Another example I used was feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her performance work around maintenance, and how care work is so often overlooked in capitalist systems. And ‘The Women Council’, a thought experiment I created imagining a NATO- or UN-scale governance body rooted in peace, care and collective intelligence. All these examples pose the same important question: What if we reorganised society around different values? What if we let culture lead? 

In the room in Vienna, we weren’t just talking theory. We worked through a brilliantly led workshop by my colleague Miriam Kathrein, Innovation Manager of our regional cluster in Austria, on the topic of weak societal signals. There was real warmth, real grief, real courage. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t sterile. That’s exactly the kind of space I believe we need more of. 

Systems are not mechanical. They’re not abstract diagrams in a PDF. They are alive. We are systems. We live them, breathe them, reinforce them and, if we’re lucky, we shift them. 

I ended my brief input with music. Nadia Boulanger, pianist, conductor and teacher to Quincy Jones and Philip Glass, wrote a piece in 1910 at the age of just 23, with war looming on the horizon. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful, and I played it because I believe music carries the emotional infrastructure of resilience. I believe that culture is not an “add-on.” It’s the pulse.  I believe that in order to navigate this wild, painful, magnificent era, we need to invest in the thinkers, makers and organisations who keep us connected to the things we live for. 

Let’s ask: What is worth protecting? What is worth imagining? And what will we carry forward as the old systems crumble? 

PS. During the week in Vienna, philosopher and writer Lea Ypi held the yearly Speech to Europe, an important read for anyone interested in care and cultural futures.