Alma Salem is a renowned Cultural expert and Curator from Syria with 30 years of expertise in the sector , Owner of Atelier Alma in Montreal- Canada. she is currently the director of Mawred, Culture Resource: Pan Arab organisation supporting the artists in the region and diaspora. Her account is therefore invaluable for reflecting on the world around us, but also for reinforcing the role of culture—and the values that this term embodies—in urban planning.

We are publishing an exclusive, unabridged version of Alma Salem’s speech delivered at the Culture Next conference in Larnaca.

When I was fourteen years old, I boarded a boat in Latakia — the Sunny Boat, we called it — and sailed with my family across the Mediterranean to Larnaca. It was a holiday. The sea was generous, the sun was wide, and Cyprus welcomed us the way this island has always welcomed people: with warmth, with openness, with a kind of effortless grace.

My father fell in love with Cyprus on that trip — so deeply, so completely, that he bought an apartment in Paphos. Something he could never have done in Damascus, where the dream of owning a home was simply out of reach. Cyprus made his dream possible, and gave him the joy and energy to keep thriving — until, eventually, he bought our home in Damascus too. For more than twenty years, our family came back every summer. Paphos became our second home. The Mediterranean was our shared living room.

I tell you this not out of nostalgia, though there is plenty of that. I tell you this because the Sunny Boat from Latakia to Larnaca is a symbol of something we must not let die — the idea that this sea, and the two great civilisational worlds it connects, carries not just passengers, but dreams, friendships, and futures.

The reality of our region today is that those boats have changed.

Seven million Syrian refugees over fifteen years. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, Libyans, Palestinians — people who once crossed this sea in search of sun and possibility — now crossing it in fear, in darkness, in desperation. The same waters that carried my family toward a holiday carried so many others toward an unknown fate. Many did not arrive.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues to shock the conscience of the world. Lebanon has endured devastating bombardment. Sudan bleeds. Syria, after fifteen years of war that killed nearly one million people and displaced fourteen million more, had barely begun to breathe before it started receiving refugees from its neighbours.

These are not distant statistics. These are our people — our poets, our painters, our publishers, our dancers and filmmakers. And increasingly, they are Europe’s neighbours, Europe’s guests, Europe’s new citizens, whether Europe has fully chosen to accept that reality or not.

The Arab world and Europe are not separated by this sea. They are connected by it. They have always been connected — by trade, by philosophy, by faith, by conflict, by art, and by the millions of people who now live, work, create, and belong on both sides of it.

And so here we are — gathered in Larnaca, a city that has itself known division and the weight of unresolved conflict — to ask: what is the role of culture in this moment? What can we do?

I want to be honest with you: culture cannot stop missiles. Books cannot rebuild cities flattened by bombs. A poem cannot bring back the dead.

But culture can do something equally essential — something that weapons absolutely cannot. Culture can keep alive our shared humanity. It can refuse the reduction of entire peoples to their crises. It can hold open the space for imagination, for dialogue, for the radical act of seeing the other as fully human.

Across the Arab world, despite everything, artists are still writing. Poets are still composing. Novels are being finished in Beirut apartments with no electricity, in Cairo studios, in Baghdad, in Tunis, in exile in Berlin and Paris and London and Stockholm. Translators are working to carry stories across languages — from Arabic to Greek, to French, to German, to English and back again — creating invisible bridges across borders that politics is busy trying to fortify.

This is not a luxury. This is resistance. This is resilience. This is how societies survive themselves.

Now I want to speak directly to why this conference, in this city, at this moment, matters so much.

If there is any geography on earth capable of breaking down the walls of isolation and polarisation being built around us, it is the space where Europe and the Arab world meet — and the Mediterranean is the heart of that space.

Not because this region is free of conflict — it is not. Not because the relationship between Europe and the Arab world is simple or equal — it is neither. There are histories of colonialism, of extraction, of asymmetric power that we cannot pretend away. They are real, and they shape the present.

But the relationship is also something else. It is centuries of mutual influence so deep that it is almost impossible to separate. Arab scholars preserved and transmitted the Greek philosophical tradition that Europe later claimed as the foundation of its civilisation. European literature shaped the modern Arabic novel. Arabic music lives in flamenco. Islamic geometry lives in Gothic cathedral windows. The coffee you drank this morning travelled from Yemen to Vienna before it reached your cup.

We are, whether we acknowledge it or not, already woven together. The question is not whether Europe and the Arab world are connected — they are, irreversibly. The question is what kind of connection we choose to build from here.

Today, millions of Arabs live in Europe — in Paris, in Berlin, in Amsterdam, in Stockholm, in London, in Rome. They are writers, architects, doctors, musicians, teachers, entrepreneurs. They carry two worlds inside them, and that is not a problem to be managed. It is a cultural resource of extraordinary richness, if we have the wisdom to treat it that way.

And in the Arab world, European culture — literature, cinema, music, design — is present in every city, consumed with curiosity and appetite by younger generations hungry for connection with the wider world, even as political circumstances make that connection harder and harder to sustain.

This mutual presence, this mutual curiosity, is something to build on. It is a foundation that exists despite everything — despite the wars, despite the refugee crises, despite the polarising narratives on all sides.

So what does it mean, practically, to make the circle go round again?

It means investing in cultural exchange between Europe and the Arab world with the same seriousness we invest in security policy or trade agreements. It means creating translation programmes, artistic residencies, co-productions, and publishing partnerships that connect writers from Beirut with readers in Berlin, filmmakers from Cairo with audiences in Copenhagen, poets from Baghdad with stages in Barcelona.

It means ensuring that the voices of those living through crisis are not silenced, but amplified — that the Syrian poet, the Lebanese filmmaker, the Libyan novelist, the Sudanese visual artist can still reach audiences and still participate in the global conversation about what our shared future might look like.

It means recognising that translation is not a technical exercise — it is an act of solidarity. Every Arabic book translated into a European language is a refusal of the narrative that says these two worlds cannot understand each other. Every European novel that reaches Arab readers carries with it the message that curiosity still flows in both directions.

And it means supporting the cultural institutions on both sides that are doing this work quietly, often without enough resources — the independent publishers, the literary festivals, the community arts spaces, the cultural centres that keep dialogue alive when politics has given up on it.

In a time of rising polarisation, culture offers something politicians and generals cannot: the possibility of genuine encounter. Not negotiation between opposing sides, but the experience of recognising yourself in someone else’s story. The surprise of finding your own grief inside a poem written in a language you are only beginning to learn. The silence that falls when a performance touches something universally true.

These moments matter. Not because they solve geopolitical problems — they don’t. But because they keep alive the parts of us that are capable of imagining solutions. They preserve what militarisation destroys first: trust, openness, and the willingness to believe that the person on the other side of the sea — or the other side of the city — is not a threat, but a neighbour.

I began with a memory of a boat called the Sunny Boat, sailing from Latakia to Larnaca on a summer holiday. My father’s dream of owning a home, made possible by the generosity of this island. Twenty summers in Paphos. The Mediterranean as a living room shared between peoples.

I want to end with that image — not as nostalgia, but as a blueprint.

The circle is still here. The sea is still here. And the deeper connection between Europe and the Arab world — built over centuries of encounter, exchange, and yes, conflict too — is still here. What we must do, together, is choose to honour it. To invest in it. To build it forward.

Choose the culture of life over the culture of fear. Choose the story that connects over the narrative that divides. Choose to see in the Arab artist living in a European city not a problem of integration, but a gift of perspective. Choose to see in the European reader curious about Arabic literature not a patron, but a peer.

The Mediterranean has made this choice before, across centuries. Europe and the Arab world have found each other before — in libraries and markets and ports and universities and concert halls, long before any of us were born.

They can find each other again.

Let us work together — from every shore of this remarkable sea, from every city where these two worlds already coexist. Let’s stop dividing this ecosystem into North and South. Let’s make the circle go round again.