Swiss cultural institutions slam development funding cut

“More Sweetly Play the Dance”, a work by South African artist William Kentridge on display during the Theater Spektakel in Zurich, August 2020. Keystone-SDA

Twelve institutions criticised on Thursday a decision by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) to cut funding for cultural cooperation with the Global South.

+ Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox

The SDC currently supports cultural development cooperation via the twelve partner organisations to the tune of CHF3.6 million ($4.2 million) per year. This amount will be cut to CHF2 million by 2028 – a reduction of 45%.

As a result, “seven successful partnerships” will be stopped, while “only five – in some cases greatly reduced – collaborations in the areas of film, literature and theatre will remain”, the partner organisations wrote in a press release on Thursday.

Artlink, for example, says that its existence is threatened. The organisation promotes performances in Switzerland by artists and cultural practitioners from Africa, Latin America, Asia and Eastern Europe. The film production fund Visions Sud Est and the Salon du livre africain in Geneva are facing a similar fate.

+ Read more: our cultural outlook for Switzerland in 2024

Cultural actors and the entire cultural sector in Switzerland and the Global South will be affected by the cut, the organisations say. This is because there are no comparable funding opportunities in Switzerland “at the interface between artistic and cultural creation and development cooperation”.

The institutions include the Theater Spektakel in Zurich and the Salon africain du livre in Geneva. The film sector is particularly well represented via distribution company Trigon Film and festivals including the Fribourg International Film Festival, the Winterthur International Short Film Festival and the Locarno Film Festival – which supports independent filmmakers and films from the Global South and East via its Open Doors section.

+ More on this year’s Locarno festival – and its new president

Indeed, the organisations used the recently opened Locarno Film Festival to make their appeal to the SDC. In a joint declaration on Thursday, they demanded that “the SDC continue to fully support this bridge between its partner countries and Switzerland and that the funds continue to be paid out in full”.

Translated from German by DeepL/dos

How we work

This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles.

If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, if you want to learn more about how we use technology, click here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to [e-mail].