MEN4DEM
Intro
MEN4DEM is a Horizon Europe-funded research project that builds bridges between society, art and science in order to explore new ways of making masculinities more inclusive and, in doing so, strengthening the future of European democracy.
Through the international MEN4DEM project, we bring together gender-equality organisations, performance artists and a consortium of academic partners from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Greece and Italy.
Through intensive collaboration, we create and exchange different forms of knowledge. Together, we develop and test approaches to transforming anti-democratic forms of masculinity into more inclusive ones.Artistic Partner
Via Berlin is the sole artistic partner within the MEN4DEM consortium and develops the project’s artistic interventions.
Our role is not to illustrate scientific findings after the research has taken place. We use art as a way of investigating the questions themselves.Working closely with researchers, gender-equality organisations and expert partners across Europe, we translate research questions and emerging insights into carefully constructed artistic environments. Instead of only asking people what they think, we create situations in which they can encounter those questions from within: through a story, a character, a relationship, a digital environment or a collective ritual.
A participant might temporarily inhabit the life of someone whose convictions are radically different from their own. They might experience how an online message gradually frames the world in terms of threat and opposition. They might recognise something of themselves in a voice from the manosphere. Or they might physically take part in letting go of ideas about masculinity and femininity they have carried with them for years.
In this way, artistic experience becomes part of the research process. Scientific knowledge and lived experience inform the artistic work; what happens inside the artistic interventions can, in turn, generate observations, questions and perspectives that feed back into research, reflection and public dialogue.
Across MEN4DEM, Via Berlin develops four interconnected artistic interventions, each approaching the central research questions through a different form.
A Solo Performance Echoes of the Manosphere
A live performance exploring the language, imagery and emotional mechanisms of the online manosphere.
Rather than focusing only on its most extreme expressions, the performance looks beneath the rhetoric and asks what makes these narratives attractive in the first place. It explores experiences of loneliness, frustration, insecurity and the search for belonging, recognition, status and identity — and how these can become entangled with narratives of grievance, dominance, misogyny and anti-democratic thought.
Within the intimacy of a solo performance, contradictory voices can inhabit the same body. Strength and vulnerability, attraction and resistance, anger and longing can exist alongside one another. Ideas normally encountered through statistics, political discourse or behind a screen are brought into a shared physical space.
A Scripted Nordic LARP
What Happens When We Meet?
The second intervention takes a radical step further: the audience becomes part of the work.
Eight participants step into the lives of eight members of one family. Across three family reunions, spread over ten fictional years, they experience how relationships, convictions and identities shift over time.
Every character carries their own history, needs, vulnerabilities, relationships and developing ideas about masculinity, femininity, family and society. Within a carefully constructed dramaturgical framework, participants decide how their character responds. They can speak or remain silent, follow or resist the path offered to them, move towards another person or turn away.
Instead of asking someone to imagine why another person might think or act differently, the LARP allows them to temporarily navigate the world from that person’s position.
Developed through an extensive international process of co-creation with researchers, gender-equality experts and MEN4DEM partners, What Happens When We Meet? turns theoretical questions about masculinity, polarisation and radicalisation into relationships, choices and lived encounters.
An Immersive Video Intervention
The third intervention moves into one of the environments where contemporary ideas about masculinity are rapidly shaped and circulated: the digital world.
Through animation, voice, image and interaction, participants encounter persuasive mechanisms frequently used in polarising and radicalising online communication.
The intervention focuses on four recurring techniques: zero-sum thinking, moral panic, scapegoating and cherry-picking. Instead of simply explaining how these mechanisms work, the experience places participants inside them — allowing them to recognise how seemingly simple messages can gradually construct a world of threat, blame and opposition.
The intervention explores whether experiencing these mechanisms artistically can strengthen our ability to recognise manipulation when we encounter it elsewhere.
A Music Theatre Ritual: ROUW | RAUW
The final intervention changes direction.
After exposing, inhabiting and examining existing structures, ROUW | RAUW asks what we might do with what we have discovered.
Created as the artistic finale of MEN4DEM, the work takes the form of a contemporary rite of passage. An actress and fourteen musicians guide participants through successive stages of recognition and acknowledgement, separation and mourning, cleansing, and finally towards the unknown.
At its heart are the roles, expectations and qualities that generations have attached to the categories ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’. What have these inherited ideas given us? Where have they restricted us? What do we want to mourn or leave behind? And what deserves to be carried with us into something new?
ROUW | RAUW does not attempt to replace one fixed definition of masculinity or femininity with another. Instead, it creates a collective space in which familiar structures can loosen and qualities that have long been labelled masculine or feminine can be reclaimed simply as human.
One research journey, four artistic forms
The four interventions are not separate artistic projects. Together, they form a trajectory.
The solo performance exposes.
The LARP embodies.
The video intervention reveals and tests.
The ritual transforms and reimagines.
Each artistic form opens up something the others cannot. Together, they move between observing and participating, the individual and the collective, physical and digital experience, analysis and imagination.
This continuous exchange between art, science and lived experience is at the heart of Via Berlin’s contribution to MEN4DEM.
Art does not enter at the end of the research process to explain what science has discovered. It becomes one of the ways in which we investigate, experience and produce knowledge.
Because some questions cannot only be answered from the outside.
Sometimes, we need to step inside them.
To read all the research outcomes, please visit the Men4Dem website.