profile

i'm a researcher, interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brussels. my work centres on political education, public archives, and aesthetic practice as forms of inquiry, pursuing questions about power, survival, and collective imagination that i first encountered as an economist and policy researcher.

on this site you'll find a selection of current projects. for a fuller record of past work and writing, you can reach out to me. for a third-person bio, scroll to the foot of this page.

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Salma Refass is a researcher, interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brussels, working across political education, public archives, and aesthetic practice. Her work is animated by a question she first encountered as an economist and policy advisor, and now pursues outside those disciplines: how does collective political imagination survive inside systems designed to flatten it?

She trained as an economist during the 2008 financial crisis and the European debt crisis in Spain, a formation that taught her how mainstream economics fails the people it claims to serve. That experience pulled her toward heterodox and feminist economics, decolonial theory, and critical development studies - lenses she still uses in her work today. For several years she worked she led policy research and impact assessment across education, health, innovation, and social policy with governments, multilateral organisations, NGOs, and universities across three continents. In 2019 she founded Yadra (formerly KnowPolicy), a Brussels-based organisation dedicated to rethinking how policy and international cooperation are designed across the Global South.

Her current work has moved toward education and creative practice as the more honest sites for the questions she cares about. She is building The Radical Commons, a public archive of radical knowledge intended to support collective political imagination and the work of thinking otherwise. Across projects, the wager is the same: that the most consequential political work happening right now is the work of helping people think.

Alongside this, Salma maintains an interdisciplinary art practice across painting, photography, writing and digital media; art as a way of engaging with power, survival, and belonging that does not require translating the body and the political.