EXCHANGES /

BEUYS DEATH DAY and RE-BIRTH-DAY

The first event took place on Beuys’ death day, 23 January – introduced by a short video ‘Landing Strip for Souls’ – created to share with a global online audience.

The focus of the first ‘death day’ meeting – which was repeated twice with 50 people enrolled in each session – had 5 main purposes:

  1. To invite Beuys to accompany us in this 100th year since his birth
  2. To welcome other cooperators and ancestors that we each value and carry with us
  3. To gather worldviews these ancestors represent and to ask the question: how do we live together and care properly for the planet with so many different ‘ancestors’ and worldviews?
  4. To set a process in motion – to inaugurate the Kassel-21 Social Sculpture Lab, which relates to the 5th purpose…
  5. LISTENING TO THE FUTURE, and asking the question:  What is required of me, of us as human beings…  with different worldviews, to do before we leave this planet? 


Many of the participants did not want the recording with their participation shared. The video is shared here without the zoom recordings of the two processes that went with it.

Here’s the video


The focus of the 12 May 2021 ‘re-birth-day’ meeting

After watching the short ‘Landing Strip for Souls’ film – participants were invited to consider what they find so valuable in what Beuys has left us for the future. It was described as a ‘re-birth-day’ because instead of simply acknowledging and honoring what Beuys said, only through people making sense of his ideas and proposals in the present, can he really come to life in the present for the future.