Easily one of Africa’s greatest writers and most inventive advocates of native culture, Soyinka shares his views on various issues with a Ghanaian anthologist 

(17 November 2020)
For “Hack Your Culture” by the Goethe-Institut, three representatives of cultural institutions in Brazil, Indonesia and Kenya met to discuss digital challenges.

How skilled labour migration can succeed: The Goethe-Institut has published two analyses on the pre-integration and mobility of skilled workers from abroad. 

„Annette, ein Heldinnenepos“ by Anne Weber has won the German Book Prize for novel of the year at the start of the Frankfurt Book Fair.

Will youth unemployment rise sharply in Europe due to the coronavirus health crisis? How can the European Union prevent this? These questions were posed during the online conference "Preventing a Lost Generation 2.0."

The artists Anna Heger and Sam Orchard send their avatars to various places in New Zealand and Germany for the comic series “Queer Comic Conversations”. They talk about their experiences as queer people, encounters with hatred and violence and about support systems.

Goethe-Institut Ghana is living up to one of its core mandates by continuing to support artists in the country despite restrictions on movement and gatherings as part of measures aimed at halting the spreading of Covid 19.
 

From London’s Tate Modern to Bavaria’s capital: curator Andrea Lissoni is moving to Munich to head up the Haus der Kunst in Munich in April 2020.

Last weekend at the Goethe-Institut’s “Hatathon Hack the Culture”, over a thousand participants developed solutions to the challenges faced by cultural workers during the coronavirus crisis. They did it all online, of course.

Wielding patience and solidarity as forces against the coronavirus pandemic: Together with the Mexican artists HeraGraff, Tomer Linaje, and Óscar Axo, the graffiti artist Jasmin Siddiqui AKA Hera created the mural “Silent Heroes” at the Goethe-Institut Mexico. She spoke with “The Latest” at Goethe about the work’s production and the role of art in times of crisis.

Im Zuge der bundesweiten Schließung von Bildungseinrichtungen beendet das Goethe-Institut mit sofortiger Wirkung sämtliche Präsenzkurse in Deutschland. Alle laufenden Deutschkurse werden ab dem 18. März bis vorerst 19. April als Online-Kurse angeboten. Johannes Ebert, Generalsekretär des Goethe-Instituts, spricht sich zudem für die Absicherung von freischaffenden Künstler*innen und Freiberufler*innen im Bildungsbereich aus.

Eleven German lecturers from Eastern Europe were trained as media experts at the invitation of the Goethe-Institut and the BR Media Literacy Projects. For The Latest at Goethe, the Ukrainian participant Julia Taips describes her expectations of the project at the Munich broadcasting centre.

The artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian is known for assuming different identities without revealing her own biography. At the Venice Biennale she worked for the German Pavilion and now presented her work at the festival "Movement (1920-2020)" by Onassis Stegi, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Athens. The journalist Despina Zefkili met the artist on behalf of „Goethe aktuell“ and spoke with her about the right to freedom of movement and our responsibility to defend it.

How can cultural institutions do justice to the diverse worlds of experience of people in a globalised world? From 16 January, the Friendly Confrontations festival by the Münchner Kammerspiele and the Goethe-Institut will investigate this question. The kick-off event will be held at the head office of the Goethe-Institut.

The new edition of “das goethe” with the theme “Digital Civil Society” will be issued on 16 January. On The Latest at Goethe, journalist Ina Holev explains how colonisation continues in the digital space.

 „AfriCourage“ ist das erste Musikfestival aus Subsahara-Afrika, das von der Europäischen Rundfunkunion (EBU) live übertragen wurde: Im Dezember 2019 standen bei der vom Goethe-Institut mitorganisierten Veranstaltung Künstler*innen auf der Bühne in Banjul.

The Youth Internet Governance Forum has been in existence since 2012. Now, the forum met for the first time in Germany. The Goethe-Institut supported members in the global South in their participation.

How African artists see German colonial history became clear during the cultural week “The Burden of Memory” organised by the Goethe-Instituts of the Sub-Saharan African region, held in the Cameroon capital city of Yaoundé.

Robots not welcome: The Goethe-Institut’s conference “Vocational Education and Labour Mobility – Think Globally!” focused on international collaboration in the context of the migration of skilled personnel.

The Goethe Institute in Los Angeles organized a four-day conference last week, called “Worlds of Homelessness”, bringing local and international scholars, advocates, artists, architects and current or formerly unhoused people together for conversations held in downtown Los Angeles.

The African continent is young and full of creativity. The Goethe-Institut supports cultural actors and networks them through projects and exchange platforms. Johannes Ebert, secretary-general of the Goethe-Institut, presents the work of the Goethe-Instituts in the cultural and creative industries in Africa in a special issue of the newspaper Politik und Kultur published together with the German Cultural Council.

Arousing interest in art, strengthening the local scene: The Goethe-Institut brought the idea of the Berlin art festival 48h Neukölln to Novosibirsk.

A promenade concert in Młyn Hilberta in the small Polish town of Dzierżoniów was the closing event of the Goethe-Institut’s Ortsgespräche (Local Calls). Artur Celiński, curator of Ortsgespräche, takes a look back at the two years of work on this project for "The Latest at Goethe".

We can read media, but can we distinguish real news from fake? The Goethe-Institut Moscow is now entering its second round with The Earth Is Flat - How to Read Media? and is creating a participatory educational project.

Only six of ten foreign students leave Germany universities with a degree. For many, dealing with different learning cultures  is difficult. How can they prepare themselves for studying in Germany?

Visitors to museums and archives usually interact with exhibits locked in display cases in darkened rooms. Yet modern technology has given us ways to more directly experience art and cultural artefacts. Coding da Vinci is an open, cultural data hackathon that digitally brings museum pieces to life.  

The continent of creativity: Enter Africa, a network project by the Goethe-Institut in 15 African countries, presented the mega-game Busara for the first time in the Indie Arena Booth at gamescom 2019.

We become through language and can just as easily be undone by it: Commissioned by Goethe-Institut Karachi the exhibition “Is it Possible to Live Outside of Language?” offers a timely reflection on the exclusion of diverse voices. With acknowledgement and appreciation for bodies that language has often failed to honor, the art works presented attempt to reimagine possibilities for the written, the spoken, and the ineffable.

There is a debate on post-colonialism being conducted in Germany more vigorously than ever before. The Goethe-Institut is tackling the topic in a series of projects, thus providing a platform for those voices from the countries of origin that are still not heard often enough.

Coworking spaces are said to be pioneering new ways of transferring knowledge and collaborative working. To what extent, however, can libraries benefit from this approach?

Until the 15th century, the Atlantic Ocean marked the perceptible border between Africa and Europe on the one hand and America on the other. Their overcoming set in motion a history of colonization, enslavement, exploitation and migration. The Goethe-Institut's conference "Echoes of the South Atlantic" puts this past in the center of an intercultural discourse.

In libraries knowledge and things have been exchanged from time immemorial. They are part of the share economy, even if many are unaware of this. But the “sharing” trend places libraries before a new challenge.

At the African Futures Festivals, African artists, academics and cultural professionals imagined their continent of tomorrow. Now, the book about the project, which continues the issues discussed at the festival, was presented there. Here is a sneak peek at the authors’ drafts of the future.

Major cities are cultural contact zones and transit spaces, places of uncertainty and the foreign. The dynamism of change arising from this constitutes the essence of urbanity and is what lends metropolises their stability and attractiveness in the first place.

German feminists have been divided into two camps for a long time. Can a new generation bridge the gap?

A fine arts degree is often both an opportunity and a risk at the same time: Only a very few art academy graduates can make a living from art afterwards. Nonetheless, the training provides experiences that can be applied in many ways later on.

In Cologne, the Academy of the Arts of the World has been oriented towards a more global perspective, providing in this way an alternative to the predominantly Eurocentric cultural scene.

In 2015, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt received the Grimme Online Award. An interview with Chantal Eschenfelder, director of the Museum’s department of education and communication.

Afrika kommt! or “Africa is Coming!” is the name of an exchange programme launched by German companies in 2008 that offers advanced training for junior executives from sub-Saharan Africa. It aims to make them familiar with workflows and management methods and create long-lasting economic alliances. The participants learn German at the Goethe-Institut in Bonn.