About This Project
Sun Flower Festival
10.07 – 05.08.2009
12.07 – 06.08.2010
10.07 – 05.08.2011
The Sun Flower Festival created a platform where adolescent participants had the possibility to meet people from different cultural backgrounds and artistic dispositions. As a multifaceted music and culture festival, the Sun Flower Festival offered a program with international music and eccentric cultural features on several stages. Theatre and recitals, puppet shows and performance art as well as jugglery and fire performance acted as a frame for all kinds of musical styles from all over Europe. Families with their kids were also included and had their own program with gaming trucks, storytellers, puppet theatre and other creative offers in which they could take part and try out.
While preparing the festival some volunteer working groups mapped the allocation of several stages. Placing great importance to a sophisticated and attractive program combining different cultural divisions creatively they granted space to new artistic forms of expression. Aside from professional artists, young regional bands and active laymen had the possibility to introduce themselves to an interested audience. Also visitors had the opportunity to present their abilities on the open stage.
An important part of the festival was the international networking of teens. For this the organisers arranged an international youth movement. For four weeks 150 youngsters aged between 16-25 years from Freiberg and Saxony lived together with about 50 young guests from all over the world in a camp on the festival area. An essential content of the event were activities for supporting the cultural exchange and transnational cultural and projects for the practical preparation of the Sun Flower Festival.
During the Sun Flower Festival workshops and creative offers dominated the program on all days of the event. All visitors to the festival were encouraged to take part in courses like drumming, theatre, jugglery, fire artistry, beatboxing, sculptural forming, bodypainting or the children’s program together with the participants of the youth movement. All of these offers were supported by professional leaders of the workshops. The visitors and participants gained an insight into the fascinating variety of possibilities getting active in the cultural scene of their environment can offer. That way, hopefully Art and Culture could become sustainable.
Running parallel to the international youth movement in Freiberg multimedia, theatre and art projects took place. These events were incorporated in the youth movement and Sun Flower Festival both spatially and contextually. Another 50 teens took part in this subsidiary working group. The special topics of these projects enriched the cultural exchange and development of new forms of art and culture with manifold interesting aspects.
Jugend- & Kulturprojekt e.V. cooperated with several associations and initiatives. This existing network of organisations (e.g. the initiative Dipol Freiberg, Treibhaus Döbeln e.V. and Vereinigung Junger Freiwilliger e.V. in Berlin) was an important factor for this regional culture and youth work.
Project venue: Freiberg (Saxony)
The project was funded by Kulturraum Mittelsachsen, Kulturamt Freiberg, Sparkasse Freiberg and by Wir für Sachsen.