Let Our Hearts Speak

Open call for a collective publication from Rethinking Eastern Europe, an artist collective founded in 2024 by Polish visual artist Zula Rabikowska that now gathers around 50 artists from Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the diaspora. Taking its title from bell hooks — 'when we love we can let our hearts speak' — the call invites work that engages with 'Eastern Europe' as a lived, shifting and often contested space: not only geography, but memory, inheritance, migration and emotional landscape. The publication brings together visual and written works reflecting on intimacy, love, identity, displacement and belonging, and understands the region as plural and expansive, shaped by diasporas, post-socialist realities and personal archives. Open to artists of any age, nationality, location and career stage, including those working outside institutions. Published in collective print and digital formats with careful artist attribution; fee waivers are available on request.