Creating Community Through Culture

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What do we discover when we encounter Zurich's culture?

With people from all over the world calling the city home, the answer goes far beyond its established traditions and cultural institutions. Each person brings their own memories and experiences, which become part of the city's everyday life. But these cultural backgrounds do not simply exist alongside one another. As people meet, share their experiences and engage with their surroundings, they can influence one another, giving rise to new forms of cultural expression rooted in the city itself.

Zurich's culture, then, is not only something to discover in its museums, theatres or galleries. It is also something continuously created by the people who inhabit it, through their communities, relationships and shared experiences. These encounters can result in artworks and collective projects, but also in something less visible: unexpected friendships, new ways of seeing the world and a growing sense of belonging.

This is the potential explored by ExpoTranskultur (ETKultur), a Zurich-based association that brings people together through artistic collaborations, storytelling and community projects. By creating spaces where different experiences and perspectives can meet, ETKultur encourages participants not only to share the cultures they come from, but also to help shape the culture of the city they now call home.

One of these projects is Found in Translation. In its 2025 edition, eight storytellers with experiences of migration collaborated with eight artists from different disciplines, transforming personal stories into artworks presented at Helmhaus Zürich. The process began with creative writing workshops and developed through months of collaboration between storytellers and artists, allowing their experiences to take shape in new artistic forms.

Among them, Natalie Noureddin and Onur Ceritoglu explored the relationship between memory and place. Drawing on Noureddin's recollections of a rooftop swimming pool from her childhood, Ceritoglu created Water finds its way (2025), an installation incorporating blue mosaics, words and light.

What began as a memory of another place became an artwork encountered in Zurich. But for Alba Chantico Ledesma, co-president of ETKultur, the value of these collaborations goes beyond the finished works. Art offers another way of communicating experiences and emotions that can be difficult to express in words. «Thanks to art, we can experience another dimension of human communication,» she explains.

Sometimes, what emerges is something neither participant could have anticipated. Ledesma recalls how a Colombian storyteller and a Swiss artist discovered a shared love of nature and gardening while collaborating on Found in Translation. Their connection grew into a friendship, and they began working together in their gardens, extending their relationship beyond the exhibition and into everyday life.

At ETKultur's International Kitchen Lab, the creative process moves from the gallery into the kitchen. At GZ Hirzenbach, participants come together to cook, share recipes and explore what happens when culinary traditions meet around the same table.

Food carries memories of places, families and everyday rituals. A familiar recipe can evoke a childhood home or a meal shared with loved ones, but it can also become the starting point for something new. At the International Kitchen Lab, participants are encouraged to experiment with the ingredients, techniques and suggestions that others bring.

Ledesma illustrates this possibility through a simple example. In Mexico, a squeeze of lime is a familiar addition to soup. What if someone preparing a Ukrainian soup decided to try the same idea? A small gesture borrowed from another culinary tradition could transform a familiar dish into something neither cook had originally imagined.

«What matters is that participants have the freedom to contribute, the openness to learn from one another, and room to create beyond familiar cultural boundaries,» Ledesma explains. The result might be a new combination of flavours, a recipe adapted together or simply the experience of preparing and sharing a meal. Yet the underlying process is much the same as in Found in Translation: people bring something of their own, encounter something unfamiliar and create something together.

Living in a city alongside people from different cultural backgrounds does not necessarily mean getting to know one another. Even in a place as internationally connected as Zurich, opportunities for meaningful encounters cannot always be taken for granted. They need spaces where people feel welcome to share their experiences, challenge assumptions and take part in something together.

For Ledesma, this is where initiatives like ETKultur can make a difference. By bringing people into shared creative processes, the association encourages them to see themselves not simply as newcomers, visitors or representatives of particular traditions, but as participants in the cultural life of the city.

«Our projects make space for that participation and help people experience themselves as contributors to the culture of the place they call home,» she explains.

What emerges from these encounters is not always predictable, nor does it always fit within the walls of a cultural institution. A childhood memory becomes an installation at Helmhaus Zürich; a familiar recipe takes on an unexpected flavour; a creative collaboration develops into a friendship. In each case, something that began with an individual experience becomes part of a shared one.

Perhaps this is what makes a city's culture so difficult to define: it is never quite finished. It grows through the people who inhabit it, the stories they carry and the relationships they build. 

After all, a city's culture is not only what we find there. It is what we leave in it.

Further information about ETKultur's projects and upcoming activities available here.