ENRS launches international social and educational campaign, “Freedom Express"!
Gdańsk – Warsaw – Budapest – Timisoara – Sopron – Bratislava – Prague – Berlin
Warsaw, 16 May 2014
Young Europeans go on a journey during which they trace the events that transformed Europe, a travelling outdoor exhibition showing the different routes to freedom, and an alternative vision of the Autumn of Nations on Facebook – these are just some of the elements of the social and educational campaign launched today under the title “Freedom Express”.To make the project happen, European Network Remembrance and Solidarity has brought together ministries of culture and major institutions dealing with twentieth-century history in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and the Czech Republic.
Twenty-five years after the spectacular events that triggered the collapse of communism in Europe, the organisers of the campaign are once again asking questions about that watershed. They are showing young people what the world was like on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and they are asking a new generation of Europeans what, in their opinion, has survived of the spirit of community and solidarity of 1989.
Which platform to Europe?
This special promotional video is used by the campaign organisers to encourage young people to embark on a two-week journey (29 August–14 September) across six countries of the former Eastern bloc.
The itinerary includes street-art projects, city games, meetings with opposition activists, joint filmmaking and writing a blog.
'We are looking for twenty exceptional individuals born at roughly the same time as freedom in this part of Europe (aged 18 through 28), who are creative, inquisitive and passionate. They can be artists, they can be involved in social projects, and they can be humanities students', explains Rafał Rogulski, Director of the Secretariat of the European Network, adding 'An international jury will evaluate the applicants’ essays and artwork concerning the 1989 breakthrough, their motivation and their achievements to date. The jury will include Krzysztof Czyżewski – writer, translator and publisher, director of the Centre ‘Borderland of Arts, Cultures and Nations’ in Sejny; Michal Murin – Slovak performance artist; Catherine Hug – critic and art curator, associated with the Kunsthalle Wien; and Lia Perjovschi – visual artist from Romania. The journey will be covered by a film crew, who will document the participants’ activities, their experiences of meeting eyewitnesses to history, and their emotional responses when visiting places of remembrance.'
Freedom of speech and more
In addition to the young participants travelling across Europe by train, there will also be a multimedia exhibition traversing the continent and displaying the many and varied roads to freedom in Central and Eastern Europe. It will open in September 2014 in Warsaw, before moving to Budapest and Berlin. Composed of eight 3-D blocks, the installation will present photographs, documents and other historical material from 1939–1991, with special emphasis on the transformation of 1989. Over the next two years the exhibition will be hosted by many European countries, and an online version will be available on the campaign website.
The “Freedom Express” campaign is accompanied by a newly launched English-language website dedicated to the transformations of 1989 in Europe. It provides detailed information about project enrolment and presents a calendar of the events of 1989–1993, biographies of the major figures of the transformation period, interviews with witnesses to history, recent research by historians, political analysts and sociologists from various countries on the impact the transformation has had on contemporary Europe, and finally texts on themes and topics related to the Autumn of Nations as they appear in film, music and literature.
Main organiser: European Network Remembrance and Solidarity
Co-organisers: National Centre for Culture (Warsaw), Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship (Berlin), Research Institute and Archives for the History of Regime Change (Budapest)
Strategic Partners: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (Poland), Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Poland), Office of Federal Government Plenipotentiary for Culture and Media (Germany), Ministry of Human Resources (Hungary), Ministry of Culture (Slovakia)
Partners: Europeana (The Netherlands), Nation’s Memory Institute (Slovakia), National Museum in Prague (Czech Republic), Forum 2000 Foundation (Czech Republic), Václav Havel Library (Czech Republic), Institute of National Remembrance (Poland), European Solidarity Centre (Poland), National Council for the Study of Securitate Archives (Romania), Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe (Germany)
Contact for the media:
Małgorzata Feusette-Czyżewska, Public Relations Manager, European Network Remembrance and Solidarity
e-mail: malgorzata.feusette@enrs.eu, phone: +48 22 891 25 08, mobile: +48 508 681 806