Practice Peace

During a four-day workshop in Munich, Xchange Perspectives e.V. engaged with artists in Media for Peace reflections – providing as well an opportunity to 'Practice Peace'.

• Watch a short film about the 'Practice Peace' workshop
  

Make peace, don't just talk about it. How can each one of us foster peaceful coexistence? What is violence, and how can we deal with it? The Practice Peace Project (PPP) provided an opportunity to reflect upon these and other questions. It was a platform for utopia, art and action, a place of encounter and inspiration.
 
The Practice Peace Project united a wide variety of artistic approaches and projects and provided a multitude of answers to the above question – answers that are offers. As a platform, it collected glimpses from a world of images, sounds and stories. It started on September 12 and ran until September 16, 2017, as a festival in Munich's Kösk. Free after Yoko Ono and John Lennon's "Imagine Peace" - but it did not stop at imagining.
 
"It's about coming together and asking questions, what does it mean: Peaceful action, what interests me in it, what conflicts can I get into, and how can I break those patterns?", explain the initiators Naomi Steuer-v.Westphalen, Karolin Knote and Maria Berauer. 
 
"What does aggression mean to me? When we get serious about these and other questions about peace, we realise very quickly how much there is in it, and how much we talk of the opposite – violence and terror."

Four-day workshop

The heart of the festival was a four-day workshop in "Media / Art for Peace" facilitated by Xchange Perspectives' Leila Bendra-Lehnert and Dominik Lehnert from September 12 to September 15. Both have been working in several countries, for example in South Sudan, Kenya and Sierra Leone, offering their "Media for Peace" workshop in Germany for the first time. 
 
They shared their experiences and their specific knowledge in the theoretical part of the workshop and put it up for conversations to make the content, insights and questions artistically productive in the practical part with the participants.
 
The invitation to participate in this workshop was aimed at artists of all disciplines, who want to get to grips with the topic "Practice Peace" theoretically and practically – registered artists covered a wide range: a puppeteer, a performer, a textile designer, a philosopher, a "space artist" and others. Ideas, concepts and works were developed together, which allowed for a humorous, poetic, wild, critical and passionate way of dealing with the often perceived powerlessness against world events.

Public festival

On September 16, a public festival day took place. Visitors had many opportunities to participate actively, to express themselves while exploring and most importantly, practice peace. The workshop participants also presented their results in a panel discussion.

The Practice Peace Project was supported by: Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München, GLS Bank Treuhand, Köşk München, CLUBZWEI, Kreisjugendring München-Stadt, brodbeck design, Allegro Pianoforti