Experiencing Freedom Through Art: IES-Europe’s Summer University

October. 1, 2026

What does Liberty have to do with the Arts?

What can a painting, a song, or a film tell us about freedom that an argument cannot? That question brought artists, scholars, and students together in Aix-en-Provence this July for IES-Europe’s Arts & Liberty Summer University, supported by Rising Tide Foundation (RTF).

IES-Europe has hosted a Summer University in Aix-en-Provence since 1989. This year, it explored how artistic expression can deepen our understanding of a free society and bring its principles to wider audiences. As IES-Europe put it, “a free society cannot be understood through reason alone. It also depends on what people feel, value, and aspire to.”

Across lectures, workshops, discussions, and performances, participants considered the relationship between art and liberty from both directions. Freedom gives artists room to create, question, and take risks. Art, in turn, can help people see what freedom makes possible and what its absence costs. The program brought economists, philosophers, writers, musicians, and other creators into a conversation they do not often share.

At the opening, RTF’s Freedom in Practice Manager, Isabelle Hirs-Schaller, shared a line by Friedrich Schiller: “Beauty is nothing other than freedom in appearance.” She explored how artists can make freedom visible and felt, giving scholars and advocates new ways to express principles they know deeply but may struggle to communicate in ways that move people. Artists who believe in freedom, meanwhile, often lack the support, platforms, and community to share their work. Isabelle hoped the Summer University could bring these voices together to learn from one another. As she put it, “A song can cross a border that a policy paper never will.”

The program included a screening of the Moving Picture Institute’s The Art of Inflation. By showing the anxiety of a family watching rising prices erode their savings and choices, the film connected economic theory to lived experience—an example of how art can help people understand the value of freedom more deeply.

Across the RTF community, bold innovators are finding ways to put the principles of a free society into practice. Their work continually teaches us more about how people experience freedom and exercise the agency to shape their own lives. Arts & Liberty adds another perspective to that shared effort: art can help people imagine what freedom means, recognize its place in their own lives, and see what they might create with it.