Conflict Zone Arts Asylum (CZAA) is a ground-breaking global production network, which unites professional artists from conflict areas to collaborate on
inter-disciplinary projects that use the dialectic nature of conflict as fuel to create a new cultural heritage and promote excellence in the arts.
Currently based in Berlin, CZAA was founded in January 2006 in London by Israeli theatre and film director Michael Ronen, son of Ilan Ronen, Artistic Director of the National Theatre in Tel Aviv.
CZAA originated in direct response to two major political events, which shook both the UK and Europe during the previous year, namely the July bombings in London and the Paris riots.
The incidents highlighted the issues arising from:
a) increasingly culturally diverse Western societies
or ‘ethnoscapes’
b) a world that has become at once local and global
due to common market trends
c) the resulting migration of conflicts
d) the uneasy tensions between tradition and
modernity
e) the problematic integration of second- and
third-generation immigrants
Against this backdrop, internationally acclaimed artists like Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol and Kosovan BBC journalist Jeta Xharra joined Mr Ronen’s proposal to form a collective that would:
a) establish a platform where people of opposing nations and different artistic backgrounds were given the opportunity to work together, thereby transforming the way conflict is expressed
b) address a market need to create high-end multicultural arts productions.
