Cultural diplomacy is typically understood as a professional field concerned with the institutional management of cultural representation: the ways states construct national identity and conduct international exchange through officially sanctioned cultural forms. Yet in practice, many of the relational functions associated with diplomacy – mediation across difference, the coordination of translocal networks, and the negotiation of social belonging – are already carried out through informal cultural infrastructures embedded in urban life.
DIY Cultural Diplomacy reconstructs a folklig diplomatic tradition inspired by Hip-hop culture. What emerges is a broader understanding of diplomacy as an urban civic practice rather than an exclusively governmental one. The project suggests that cultural communities do not simply represent the city socially; they actively produce forms of civic infrastructure that connect fragmented institutions, publics, and transnational urban life. This has implications for how cities think about inclusion, participation, and cultural policy beyond representation alone.
DIY Cultural Diplomacy is an ongoing project, initially supported by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee (2019). Project website: www.diyculturaldiplomacy.art.
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[…] Cite emerged from a trans-media project called DIY Cultural Diplomacy (2020) that challenged the idea of diversity and inclusion in Swedish cultural policy. It birth an […]
[…] med Wave Gallery har växt fram under lång tid och är en sammanfattning av erfarenheten med DIY Cultural Diplomacy och arbetet med On Cite (framförallt Pass-The-Aux och Beat Tech […]
[…] Appropriation, in this account, is not a political act directed against colonial power. It is a generative process that articulates through everyday life, social practices, and individual strategies for social and economic mobility. This is the theoretical foundation for the concept of appropriation as it operates across the rest of this work. It informs the critical stance that runs through the project; that the discrepancy between institutional representations of cities and what communities actually produce within them is structural. Recognizing it as structural is the first condition for working within it deliberately, and for designing interventions that account for what the official representation leaves out (see DIY Cultural Diplomacy). […]