“Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” they said.

And so many of us entered arts and culture driven by passion: an urge to create or to remain close to creation; to encounter one another through exhibitions, performances, cultural spaces and shared experiences; to find meaning and human connection.

But once we begin working in the field, another reality often emerges.

How frequently do we actually feel safe?

Do we feel taken care of by our teams, collaborators and leaders? Do we take care of others through the ways we create, produce, communicate, compensate and make decisions?

Although arts and culture are grouped within the humanities, working in culture does not always feel particularly humane. Many cultural workers struggle to find the conditions necessary to support themselves, let alone one another. Overwork is romanticised as commitment. Chaos is confused with creativity. Unpaid labour is presented as an opportunity. A willingness to endure instability becomes evidence that someone truly belongs in the field.

We explored many of these contradictions with artist and cultural manager Zeynep Ayta in the first episode of the Offstudio Podcast, Rethinking Care In Culture: How We Work Together in the Arts. Our conversation examined safety, leadership, unpaid labour, cultural work, turnover and the often-unseen role of care in creative environments.

But after recording the conversation, one question kept returning:

What if care is not an additional benefit of a healthy workplace, but the infrastructure that makes a workplace sustainable at all?

Infrastructure is usually understood as the underlying system that allows something else to function: roads that enable movement, foundations that keep buildings standing, or communication networks that allow information to circulate.

Care serves a similar function in human environments.

Care is what allows people, relationships and organisations to continue through time without steadily destroying themselves. It creates the conditions through which we can work, contribute, experiment, disagree, learn, recover and remain connected.

This is why care should not be reduced to kindness, friendliness or occasional gestures of appreciation. It is not the office fruit bowl, a wellbeing workshop or a message after someone has already reached exhaustion.

Care is built through repeated everyday actions:

These acts create an environment in which people can remain strong over a long period. Without them, even the most inspiring projects become fragile. The work may continue temporarily, but often through exhaustion, fear, guilt, instability or the regular replacement of those who can no longer tolerate the conditions.

In this sense, care is a sustainable infrastructure—and our values-based response to a culture of exploitation.

Most people possess an internal compass that helps them recognise what nurtures them and what threatens them. We experience this through instinct, intuition, emotion and the body.

We know when communication feels manipulative. We know when an expectation is unreasonable. We know when someone is being humiliated rather than guided. We know when a leader’s words and actions contradict one another.

Yet we frequently learn to override this knowledge.

We are told:

“This is simply how the sector works.”

“Everyone has to sacrifice at the beginning.”

“You should be grateful to have a job in the arts.”

“There isn’t enough money to do things differently.”

“This is how it has always been done.”

These explanations do not prove that a practice is necessary, ethical or effective. They only demonstrate that it has been repeated.

I refuse to accept the normalisation of damaging behaviour as an unavoidable feature of working life. I refuse to accept “this is just the way things are” as a meaningful answer because in reality, this is an empty and comfortable response to a situation that demands honesty.

Instead, I invite us to ask ourselves more difficult questions:

We can offer suggestions, but we must also remain open to approaches we have not yet imagined. The first responsibility is to stop pretending that what harms us is normal simply because it is widespread.

Arts and culture frequently speak about creativity, belonging, human expression and social wellbeing. Yet the internal cultures of our institutions often reward very different things.

Artists may be pressured to create more work, provide more saleable objects, maintain constant visibility and meet schedules that have little relationship to the actual creative process.

Creativity requires discipline, but it cannot always be commanded according to an external timetable. It is connected to emotional states, life experiences, unconscious processes, research, experimentation and the gradual formation of ideas that we may not yet understand.

Sometimes a work arrives through an unexpected moment of clarity. At other times it emerges through a long and meticulous process of craft. Neither can be rushed simply because an exhibition, gallery or communications schedule requires a new output.

You can enter the studio every day, but you cannot schedule the precise hour at which an idea will become alive.

The word “community” is everywhere, but many cultural gatherings remain structured around visibility, validation, networking and access. Instead of asking how we can learn from and care for one another, we are encouraged to consider what every encounter might offer our careers.

Who should I know? Who can introduce me to someone? Who might validate my work What opportunity might come from this relationship?

A community cannot be sustained if every relationship is approached primarily as a transaction.

Arts and culture are publicly defended as essential to collective wellbeing, while many of the people producing them are denied the conditions required for their own wellbeing.

A field that creates work for people must also learn to take care of its people.

The work of bell hooks matters here not because she wrote a corporate manual for cultural organisations, but because her understanding of love gives us a different foundation from which to think about all human relationships. Her writings, to me, contain lessons the world needs.

Reading All About Love changed my understanding of what healthy love is. hooks refuses to treat love as an abstract feeling or an emotional state beyond our control.

Drawing on a definition developed by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, she frames love as an intention and an action oriented towards nurturing one’s own or another person’s growth.

She describes a love ethic as involving care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge—not occasionally, but as dimensions to be practised in everyday life.

The word action is essential.

Love is not proven by what an organisation says it values. Care is not proven by the language in a mission statement. Both become real through behaviour.

An institution can say it respects its workers while repeatedly contacting them outside agreed hours. A leader can claim to welcome feedback while punishing anyone who identifies a problem, or a festival can celebrate community while relying on exhausted volunteers who are not given proper food, rest or protection.

The real culture of an organisation is revealed by what it repeatedly does.

This is where another important part of hooks’ thinking becomes relevant: her critique of domination. Across her work, she asks us to pay attention to relationships built around control, coercion, hierarchy and the expectation that some people must become smaller for others to maintain their power.

Applied to a working environment, this gives us another way of looking at care. A workplace cannot meaningfully describe itself as caring while depending on fear, humiliation, excessive control or the disposability of its people. Care cannot simply be added on top of an environment that continues to operate through these behaviours.

And this is important because care is sometimes misunderstood as softness: as being nice, avoiding conflict or lowering expectations. But care does not remove responsibility or standards. If anything, it asks more from us. It asks us to be honest without humiliating, to hold people accountable without dehumanising them, and to exercise leadership without turning authority into control.

There is another part of hooks’ definition that I find particularly useful when thinking about work: growth.

If love involves the will to nurture our own growth and the growth of another person, then perhaps we should also ask what our working environments are doing to the people inside them.

We spend so much time asking:

What can this person contribute? What can they produce? What skills can they bring to this project? How can they help us reach our goals?

But a caring environment should also be able to ask:

Who is this person becoming while they are here?

Are they learning? Are they gaining confidence? Are they being given room to contribute ideas? Are they developing skills and relationships that will remain with them beyond this particular job, exhibition or project? Or are we simply extracting as much as possible from them while they are available to us?

Extraction asks: What can you give us?

Care also asks: What can grow here?

This does not mean that every workplace must become a family, a therapeutic space or the centre of someone’s emotional life. It means recognising something much simpler: wherever people work together, we are affecting one another.

Our structures, expectations, communication and leadership leave traces.

The question is what kind of traces we want to leave.

And if care is something we practise rather than something we merely believe in, then we need to translate these ideas into the ordinary ways we work together.

It means sharing the information people need to understand a decision rather than using ambiguity to maintain control. It means being honest about budgets, limitations, priorities and expectations.

A leader holds responsibility for the vision of an organisation or project. Their role is not only to evaluate whether someone has met that vision, but to orient people towards it. Feedback should help someone understand, align and grow—not punish them for failing to read the leader’s mind.

Everyone inside an organisation, including its leadership, must remain capable of learning. A worker proposing an improvement is not necessarily attacking the institution. They may be demonstrating commitment to its future.

Hiring someone should mean trusting their knowledge, intentions and ability to fulfil the role. Constantly questioning their judgement while refusing to give them autonomy prevents them from contributing the qualities for which they were hired.

Trust does not mean avoiding accountability. It means beginning from the assumption that people are acting in good faith and addressing problems through honest, non-violent communication when they arise.

People still have bodies when they enter cultural spaces.

They need food, water, rest, shelter, safety and moments in which their minds can recover. Care can be as simple as inviting someone who has been intensely focused for several hours to take a coffee break. It may mean checking that a colleague who forgot lunch has something to eat. It may mean creating room for people to rest during the day and return to their work later.

Care respects different rhythms. Some people work best early in the morning, while others concentrate more effectively at night. Where the work allows it, flexibility should support people’s abilities rather than demand constant accessibility.

It involves wanting to know who people are, how they work, where they come from, what they need and what they hope to learn. It means seeing someone as a person—not merely as the function they perform.

One of the most significant realisations of my professional life came after leaving the technology sector to work in arts and culture.

I expected the cultural field to feel less greedy, more humane and more connected to meaningful impact. Instead, I often felt considerably better cared for in technology environments than I did in the arts. This was shocking.

I do not want to generalise across either sector. There are exploitative technology companies and caring cultural organisations. My experience nevertheless revealed that care is not automatically produced by working with supposedly humanistic subject matter.

In the technology environments where I worked, there were buddy systems for new employees, structured onboarding, professional development programmes and guidance on how to give and receive feedback. Teams used shared tools, common processes and regular retrospectives—not only to assess outputs, but to reflect on how people were working together.

There was a recognisable culture around teamwork.

People were taught how communication should happen. There were processes for aligning expectations, discussing difficulties and continually adapting the way the organisation operated. Workers supported one another through visa procedures, mental health challenges and the ordinary pressures of life.

Many of these practices require resources, but they are not only products of larger budgets. They require systems thinking, preparation and the belief that how people work together deserves serious attention.

The result was commitment.

People remained invested in those environments because they felt safe, valued and supported. Care did not weaken productivity. It made sustained contribution possible.

By contrast, many cultural organisations operate through permanent urgency. Roles are undefined, responsibilities constantly expand and systems remain dependent on the memory or preferences of one central person. Scarcity becomes a way of thinking as much as a financial condition.

When people operate from scarcity, they often become less generous with information, time, acknowledgement and trust.

Care requires us to resist this reflex.

A caring organisation does not need to be perfect. It needs to be intentional, reflective and willing to adjust.

Here are some practices that can help transform care from an aspiration into infrastructure.

Agree on responsibilities, deadlines, availability and decision-making processes. When something changes, acknowledge the change rather than quietly expanding someone’s role.

Feedback should clarify the vision, recognise what is working and identify what can develop. It should never be used to shame, destabilise or demonstrate authority.

Introduce people to the language, systems, rhythms and relationships of the organisation. Create buddy systems so that a new person has someone to approach without fear of appearing unprepared.

Plan food, water, shelter, breaks and reasonable hours into every project. Do not wait until someone becomes visibly unwell before acknowledging that they have a body.

Hold regular conversations about how the team is working—not only what it is producing. Retrospectives, facilitated workshops and structured listening sessions can help identify problems before they become crises.

Document processes, responsibilities, values and working methods. Shared knowledge should belong to the organisation, not remain trapped inside one founder, leader or long-term employee.

Give people autonomy over the work they were hired to do. When concerns arise, address them clearly rather than responding through surveillance, assumptions or passive aggression.

Relationship-building, translation, emotional support, mentoring, documentation and community care are forms of work. Make them visible and acknowledge the people performing them.

Agree on scope, timelines, communication and revisions together. Follow the contract. Do not demand employee-level availability from someone without offering employee-level security.

Ensure volunteers receive safety, rest, sustenance, recognition and a meaningful experience. Do not use the language of community to justify extracting free labour.

Respect identities, communication styles, personal rhythms and different ways of contributing. Inclusion is not asking people to enter the room and then become identical.

Ask people what they want to learn. Give them opportunities to develop, contribute ideas and understand the impact of their work.

At Artist Ally, we are not only speaking about care. We are studying it, testing it and translating it into practical forms.

We bring these questions into our events, mentorships and community gatherings: What makes a community genuinely valuable? What helps a creative practice remain sustainable? How can artists understand their own needs, boundaries and vision while learning to work better with others?

For us, care moves in both directions. It means helping people build the self-understanding and structure needed to navigate the cultural ecosystem with greater confidence, while also asking how institutions and organisations can create healthier conditions for the people they work with.

This takes shape through orientation, mentorship, community experiences and practical resources that people can add to their own professional toolbox. We are also developing a booklet on care and a practical Care in Arts & Culture Playbook (have something to share on this and want to collaborate? Send us a message!), designed to help cultural organisations reflect on how they work with artists, employees, freelancers, volunteers and communities.

But care also lives in much smaller decisions: how someone is welcomed into a room, whether information is accessible, how a mentorship conversation is held, whether people are listened to, and whether they are treated as individuals rather than simply as opportunities or outputs.

We do not claim to hold the complete answer. We want to help create the conditions in which better answers can emerge collectively.

We'd also love to hear your own experiences through our collaborative Mapping Care in the Arts Miro board.

I want fair compensation in the arts.
I want better working conditions and more sustainable careers.

But none of that will be enough if we continue reproducing the same behaviours underneath them.

A working environment is also a culture. And like any culture, it is shaped by what we repeatedly practise, tolerate, reward and refuse to question.

The future of arts and culture will not only be shaped by what we produce. It will also be shaped by how we produce it, how we treat one another while doing so, and whether we learn to create without consuming one another.

That begins when we stop saying, “This is just how it is,” and start asking:

How could we do this better?

With care & intention,

— Xav, Founder of Artist Ally