The art of staying human together
I did not expect to be moved by Bad Bunny’s 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. I am not a football person, but I am a Bad Bunny person. I was expecting something beautiful, celebratory and fun (it’s Bad Bunny after all) but I was not prepared for what I saw, what it made me feel, and how it made me think.
The Super Bowl halftime show is a stage built up over decades to define, pretty explicitly, what “American” culture is. White mostly, country, classic rock, glittery pop. (Note that I am not including Kendrick Lamar’s iconic 2025 performance here.) The whole thing is shrink-wrapped Americana, and Bad Bunny split it open from the inside and let it spill past its own seams. As he closed out his performance, he looked into the camera and, switching to English for the only time all night, said “God bless America,” then listed every country in the Americas. He didn’t make an overt argument. He didn’t have his fist in the air. He was celebrating, and the celebration was the point. He made millions of people feel part of something expansive rather than exclusive and connected to something bigger than any one country through joy alone.
I keep coming back to that feeling of belonging because during my 15 years in the democracy support sector, I’ve had two major frustrations. One is that American and European democracy has been treated as the model to be exported outward, distinct from the rest of the world and, until recent years, immune to backsliding. The other is that we’ve poured our energy into laws, institutions, elections, and formal rights frameworks. These systems are all important and worth defending, but we’ve put almost no real thought or resources into the cultural dimensions, into what makes people feel that democracy is genuinely theirs, and that it is worth celebrating, worth fighting for, and worth participating in. It is worth more than just voting every few years.
What Bad Bunny did on that stage, just by celebrating, was connect people to something beyond what they’d been told they belong to. That feeling of belonging is exactly what’s been missing.
What Really Holds Us Together When the Formal Infrastructure Fails
Last year, when the US democracy sector was gutted almost overnight and so much of what we’d spent decades building collapsed in a matter of weeks, we at Curious Shapes launched the Big Hope Project. We organized a few separate but intersecting communities, growing each one through its own ongoing event series, around international solidarity, joy and creativity, and mutual aid. None of these were “programs.” We didn’t have a theory of change. They were more like experiments in what happens when you stop strategizing and grant writing, stop thinking about jurisdiction or format, and just get people into a room together and ask them to make something beautiful or be funny or talk honestly about how they sustain themselves and their communities.
I’ve learned over and over this past year that what really holds people together when the formal infrastructure fails isn’t platforms or coalitions or even funding. It’s something harder to name and harder to fund. People say international solidarity like it’s something we already have. But solidarity around what? What actually bonds us together? What gives us the will to fight bigger fights and to see ourselves in each other and to help? The answer lies in that Bad Bunny space: culture, heart, the strength that comes through joy and creativity, the things that surprise us and make us feel more human, more connected. To some, art and culture sound too warm and fuzzy to be serious or strategic. But they are both. They are potent, and they are worth investing in.
People are already beginning to prove this. Organizations like the Center for Artistic Activism and Beautiful Trouble map creative resistance tactics to understand how art changes what people feel and do. Srđa Popović turned laughtivism into a training methodology for movements in more than 50 countries. Researchers like Kanu Pandey at the Creative Citizenship Lab at UC Santa Barbara are now studying how humor moves people to act. The practice exists and the theory is developing, both within movements and within countries.
The question that keeps pulling at me is what happens when art is taken across borders. What do shared celebration and shared grief do when you’re not in the same place and yet feel, more and more, that you’re in the same story? That question feels more urgent right now when the threats are global and the formal infrastructure connecting democratic movements is under serious pressure. At the same time, the technology exists in ways it didn’t a generation ago and can connect people who are facing different versions of the same problems.
When I think about the work we started this year, I try to do so with healthy skepticism. Is this just “hopecore” (uplifting content that makes someone feel something just enough to feed the algorithm and keep them scrolling)? Does this kind of conversation flatten real differences or dress up deeply unequal conditions to make them easier to live with? And are authoritarians around the world already better at this culture-and-community work than we are? These are real questions, and I don’t have clean answers. But I have to believe this work is more than a distraction, more than a cover, and not a fight already lost. So I look for where it’s already working and for the people making it work.
Four Arguments on How Culture Is Vital for Democracy Work
As part of our International Solidarity series, we held an event where we brought together four people who have spent their careers on what culture does that formal democracy work doesn’t: a rapper in Senegal, a filmmaker in Belarus, a performance artist exiled from Hong Kong, and a video-game lawyer in Argentina. While they work in very different media and out of very different histories, the mechanisms they described echoed across all of the conversations.
Art Counters the Isolation that Makes People Passive. In Senegal, Cheikh Seck, who is known as Keyti, cofounded Journal Rappé, a project that combined hip hop and the news. The project, which eventually spread to 11 countries, did something far deeper than make politics entertaining. The humor, the satire, the format were the entry point; the goal, he told me, was to make people participants rather than an audience. This starts by breaking the isolation. “The opposite is community. The opposite is people feeling that they are not isolated, alone, knowing that there are hundreds, thousands of others who feel just like them.”
And what worked in Senegal, Keyti argues, is also what crosses borders: not the specific form but the feeling underneath it, the same recognition that you are not alone. “Facts and numbers can’t do that. Emotions conveyed through songs, books, movies, colors, shapes operate more naturally and much faster because they bring in the human aspect of it all.” In each country, Journal Rappé was built on the same principle: create a platform that gets younger people feeling like protagonists in politics, and like they belong to something larger than themselves.
Authoritarian Systems Destroy Imagination, but Creative Practice and Community Can Restore It. When Belarusian filmmaker Sasha Ihnatovich works with activists and communities, she asks them to imagine the world they’re working toward. Most of the time, she says, they can’t.
Authoritarian rule does more than repress dissent. It builds what she calls a “regime of the lack of imagination,” which narrows the space of what seems possible. This is where art and creative practice become structurally necessary rather than tactically useful. They don’t just communicate a message; they restore the capacity to imagine something different.
And if imagination is what gives us the futures we want, Ihnatovich argues, then it is also how that work scales beyond any one country. She’s careful here: “Joy is a privilege, and pleasure requires security.” The capacity to imagine alternatives is not equally available to everyone. But that is exactly why imagining together matters. The act of thinking together across distance reveals that the narrowing being experienced has the same source and that no one has to face it alone.
Tenderness Can Turn Shared Grief into the Will to Keep Going. “Tenderness is the only force to rewrite the brutal reality.” That is Loretta Lau, a performance and visual artist in exile from Hong Kong and founder of NGO DEI. Lau’s work moves between the deeply personal and the historical, connecting her own grief as an artist in exile to the echoing experiences of displacement, loss, and erasure across other times and places. In a performance piece, she guided 20 people through a scene with their eyes closed. Two people, “I” and “you,” walk through a spring day in Beijing in 1989, until the Tiananmen massacre separates them. Then it is Hong Kong, 2019: you have a daughter now, she’s fifteen, and you’re afraid you’ll lose her the way you once lost me. “They close their eyes,” Lau says, “and they make their own movie in their mind.” She also performed at Terezín, the Nazi concentration camp in the Czech Republic. Her piece set Hong Kong’s story alongside that history, and a woman who had been in the camp as a toddler followed her step for step through the whole performance, a survivor of one catastrophe recognizing herself in another.
In both cases, the grief is personal and utterly specific, but it echoes and it makes people see themselves and their grief in her own experience. The recognition happens below the level of explanation, across decades, across borders, across entirely different histories, because the loss and fear, the refusal to let brutal things have the final word—all of it is the same and that shared grief can become the nerve to keep going.
Shared Imagination Creates Potential for Action. Micaela Mantegna is an Argentine tech ethicist, video-game lawyer, and digital-rights activist known as the Abogamer. She spent years inside gaming and online communities, spaces built on collective imagination, shared passion, the joy of finding your people. Then she watched authoritarian movements begin to exploit those same spaces. Not through ideology but through something simpler: they found people who felt the system had failed them and turned that anger outward.
While anger and joy are both powerful motivators, anger is far easier to mobilize because it feeds on hopelessness. Joy is more difficult to manipulate because it requires imagination. Joy also gives you something anger can’t: a vision of what you’re actually building toward. Art, creativity, and collective imagination are what make that vision feel possible, even necessary. “Collective imagining is an act that can feel big, and also you can do it.”
Mantegna sees the best version of this as less about creating connection directly through discrete campaigns and more about creating the conditions for people to step into each other’s lives. She points to a game called Bury Me, My Love, where you can only reach your wife by text as she tries to flee Syria and get to Europe, her messages arriving when they arrive, the war closing behind her. “Gaming can give us another life beyond ordinary life and imagine ourselves beyond the limits of where you were born or who you are.” Play, creativity, and shared imagination can take something you only read about in the news and put you inside it. The empathy that comes from that doesn’t automatically lead to action, but it creates the conditions for action when the moment arrives.
Real International Solidarity Through Collective Dreaming
Breaking isolation, restoring imagination, recognizing yourself in another’s grief, turning feeling into readiness: none of these actions depend on being in the same place and yet they are how people an ocean apart can come to feel they are in the same story and are not facing it alone. The cultural dimension we never invested in isn’t a soft accompaniment to democracy work, but it may be the most essential part of it. This version can do something a report or a news segment can’t: it makes the conditions visible, makes it possible to feel the weight rather than just learn the details. And then, maybe—hopefully—it moves people to do something rather than only feel something.
This piece was originally published as part of the Kettering Foundation’s Democracy Around the Globe blog series. Original link here.