Middle Ground is an itinerant artistic research trajectory, tool, and platform in the shape of a cargo bike. It is a mobile vessel for research, experimentation, and presentation for artists with ideas that shift with the land, blow with the wind, and find people where they are geographically and politically.
Facilitated by CAR, it is an ongoing open-call for proposals of routes, destinations, and use-cases for how a cargo bike could be used to apply artistic research and practice in innovative and equitable ways.
If you have a project or concept that you would like to implement with the Middle Ground Cargo bike as a platform you can contact CAR with your proposal. Please include an explainer of your plan in general artistically and logistically, how a cargo bike (practically and conceptually) would benefit you, and a link to your portfolio or examples of previous work.
Middle Ground’s underlying intention is to connect and reclaim in a society where binary politics and geographies are cut through by anger, fear, and motorways. Today it is taboo to look for ways to compromise with “the other side” rather than finding solidarity with all people. But sometimes, all it can take is to ride a bike somewhere and talk to someone new, to realise that we’re not so different, and often, we want the same things.
Putting together artistic research and a cargo bike therefore is both a political and practical choice.
If the intention is to bridge division, in ways uniting working people, then we need to get rid of the walls that shut each other out. Art spaces are often exclusionary, and art ideals are often disconnected from the reality of living.
Middle Ground uses the cargo bike to melt these boundaries. When someone shows up in a small village on a strange giant bike, even if they look suspicious, they’re going to illicit some kind of mutual connection with local people.
Middle Ground launched in 2025 as an artistic research residencies series, using a cargo bike as a studio, tool, and mobile living experiment. In 2025, four artists undertook journeys, becoming artists in motion for up to 1 month each and gathering bodies of research to take onwards in their practices. You can see updates from throughout the journeys on the Middle Ground instagram.
CAR also exhibited a publication & wall display at Coppi Coffee in Rotterdam, summarising the routes, experiences, research, and more of these first pilot journeys. You can see more about the selected artists on their sites/profiles:
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For more information, to get in touch for questions or with offers of support and funding please email: