Kultursymposium Weimar 2019
Recalculating the Route

From 19 to 21 June 2019, the world will meet in Weimar. More than 300 international guests from culture, industry, science, journalism, media and politics will shed light on the great upheavals of our era. Participants include Anab Jain, Pankaj Mishra, the vice president of the German Bundestag Claudia Roth and the artists collective Most Mechanics Are Crooks.

It’s what the world is talking about. “This year’s Kultursymposium Weimar will take up the social upheavals of our time and place them in a cultural, economic and political context. For three days, artistic and scientific approaches to current topics of the future will be explored in a creative festival atmosphere,” said Johannes Ebert, secretary-general of the Goethe-Institut. Representatives from science, culture, politics, industry, journalism and publishing will present their perspectives on the theme “Recalculating the Route.” The over 50 events will take place on three days in eight different locations in Weimar. The E-Werk in Weimar serves as the festival centre for the Kultursymposium 2019. Perspectives from different cultures were prepared in advance in twelve events abroad by the worldwide network of the Goethe-Institut.
 
The programme consists of four main topics that simultaneously form the guiding questions of the Kultursymposium:
ORIENT//ATION – How do we keep our bearings in an increasingly complex world?
AUTO//NOMY – In the face of rapid technological change, how do we remain the authors of our lives?
RE//GRESSION – World politics in reverse – are we experiencing a political turn of events?
DIGI//NOMICS – How will the economy tick tomorrow and the day after tomorrow?

The feeling of being lost

The keynote address for the symposium opening will be held by the British designer and filmmaker Anab Jain, founder of the experimental design firm Superflux. Afterwards, she will discuss the key questions of the symposium with, among others, the Kenyan political scientist Nanjira Sambuli and the personnel director of the Bertelsmann media group, Immanuel Hermreck. The Indian writer and essayist Pankaj Mishra will speak with the Turkish constitutional expert Ece Göztepe and the political scientist Emile Chabal from Great Britain about “R.I.P. Democracy. How Do Democracies Die?” while writers Panashe Chigumadzi (Zimbabwe), Assaf Gavron (Israel), Hao Jingfang (China) and Julia von Lucadou (Germany) talk about “The Feeling of Being Lost” in literature. The vice president of the German Bundestag, Claudia Roth, will also participate in a panel discussion on “The Brutalization of Language in Political Discourse”.
 
The programme will be rounded off by a series of art and cultural events: The artists collective Most Mechanics Are Crooks from Greece, for example, deals with self-staging in digital media in their performative work “Semblance in Post-digital Times.”
 
So what are you waiting for? The remaining tickets for the Kultursymposium Weimar are still available online.