LivingFuture congress in Berlin

 

At the LivingFuture congress in Berlin young Germans and Israelis have the opportunity to meet and look to the future together.

 

Networking information disseminators with one another – this is one of the objectives of LivingFuture in Berlin. At the congress the German-Israeli Future Forum (DIZF) will be bringing together some 120 participants from the projects it sponsors between May 9 and 12, 2015. These information disseminators are young adults aged between 18 and 40 from various areas of civil society in Israel and Germany who are working on future-oriented projects in bilateral teams. As Mirjam Daur of the DIZF explains, “We thought about what our contribution might be to the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Israel and Germany. There will be a lot of looking back at the past. Then we thought we would bring players together to pose the question of what is important for the next 50 years.”

 

The LivingFuture programme is comprised of workshops, space for encounters and the exchange of opinions, the presentation of artistic projects and the documentation of the events at the congress by a team of German and Israeli illustrators. One of the subjects of the workshops is migration and the dimensions of cultural diversity. Special focus will be given to taking a closer look at relations between Israel and Germany. Accordingly, there will, for example, be discussions on how individual networks can be established and fostered long term, both on an analogue and on a digital level. In an intervention game participants are invited to play the role of immigration expert. Two installations are available to everybody – songs from the cradle in the regions where people spent their childhoods are collected in the lullaby box. At the end there will be a map showing where visitors to the congress come from. The hybrid letterbox allows participants to answer questions on postcards. During the congress these will be projected onto the wall or published in blogs. The objective is to encourage dialogue at the interface between digitally published and handwritten messages. There will be an opportunity to continue this at the second part of the congress in Tel Aviv in November.

Even if not every event delivers such a hands-on result as “Formula Atid –the first German-Israeli racing car”, the wide range of topics covered by the workshops will always be illustrated from the viewpoints of both the German and Israeli actors and will become firmly anchored in their own countries through the exchange of opinions.

 

The Future Forum was the result of a joint idea by the heads of state in the two countries in 2005. The forum started its work in 2009.

 

More on the work of the DIZF