Active Exhibition

Friday, 1st of March 2013, 7pm

After the Mural Co-creation event, which resulted in two murals covered with inventive pictures and written comments, we organized a follow-up event: an exhibition of the finished murals followed by a few rounds of discussion and reflection, which took place on the 1st of March at the Weingut Andreas Dilger.

The whole event was professionally moderated by our colleague Cameron. After the official welcome and opening, the MEG coordinator, Prof. Dr. Michael Pregernig held a short speech about the MEG program and the SOE process, followed by our colleague Lívia, who held a short presentation of our concept (the topic, the idea behind the mural) and the mural event.

An icebreaker activity (4 corners) helped guests dive into the topic. We asked a range of questions, first finding out if people came from Freiburg or not, to asking about how Freiburg did or did not help them to be green.

After this interactive activity, Prof. Dr. Andreas Ernst, a specialist in environmental psychology, gave a short presentation about the varying lifestyles in Freiburg and how these connect to different ways of being green. He also spoke about what this might imply for crafting efficient green messages to different people. The presentation was followed by a Q&A session, where many of the guests posed questions to Professor Ernst.

Participants were encouraged to take part in discussion sessions and further activities, while enjoying different varieties of organic wine, produced by Andreas Dilger. In between activities and presentations, guests also had time to explore the mural, a video screening of our mural co-creation event was also run and there was live guitar music by Musa Baran.

After Dr. Ernst’s presentation and Q&A session, in order to keep up the good atmosphere and further promote discussion, two short sketches were played. One of them represented two old ladies walking on the street, who suddenly find themselves in front of the mural. They are shocked by the mural, thinking that “it’s full of scribbles” and that the city authorities should dispose of it at once. Afterwards, while reading some of the texts on the mural, they dismiss them as written by “youngsters these days, who complain about everything”.

In the second sketch, a hippy girl sits on the ground contemplating the mural, while two guys show up. One of them, who is fond of reading and studying, considers the mural as a masterpiece of the XXI century, and renewable energy as the solution to our future problems. The other one thinks that the mural is just “street art”, agrees with the comment “Fuck you, Vauban” and doesn’t care about the environment. When the girl says “Every time you kill an animal, you kill a soul”, the latter replies “who cares? As long as I have enough protein for my muscles, I don’t!”

After this short artistic moment, we tried to provide the guests with some room for discussion, and so on each cocktail table one question could be found on a piece of paper that the people from that table were encouraged to discuss. Some of the questions were:

• How does a green lifestyle look like? Is it affordable to everyone?  What about you?
• Should I make Freiburg greener? Am I Green? How can I contribute?
• How is your conscience related to your green behavior? Is it a driver?
• Is green consumerism the way forward?
• How far would you be willing to go in order to live sustainably?
• If you focus on promoting a green agenda, could this blind you to other relevant social issues? By focusing on promoting a green agenda, could you be blind to other relevant social questions?

After a fruitful round of discussion at the tables, guests were invited to share some insights, by giving everyone a brief summary of what had been discussed at their table. Cameron then closed the event on a positive note, inviting guests to stay longer for an informal get-together, with continued reflections, discussion and drinking (!).

Overall, we are pleased with our final event and we consider it a success, especially taking into account that there were many participants, they had a good time, and our event truly engaged with them in reflections and discussion on the topic we chose. However, we were not able to reach many ordinary citizens of Freiburg, as most of our guests were students and environmentalists.

Here some impressions: