Green and honored
Siegfried Benker is now officially an honorary citizen of the city of Munich. Mayor Dominik Krause presented the honorary citizenship certificate to the former chairman of the city council group The Greens/Pink List and managing director of Münchenstift GmbH. Benker is thus the 67th citizen of Munich to receive this award. He is the first “Green honorary citizen,” emphasized party colleague Krause at the award ceremony. Benker has been committed to integration and a humane immigration policy for decades, launched projects for people infected with HIV and campaigned against right-wing extremism.
Young and good
Ayşe Güvendiren and Yevgen Bondarskyy will receive the Dr. Otto Kasten Prize 2024. The award is supported by the foundation of the same name and awarded in cooperation with the German Stage Association to outstanding young theater makers. This year the focus is on the culture of remembrance and political education. Yevgen Bondarskyy, born in Luhansk in 1989, has developed the play “What hurts me… no longer” with four Ukrainian young people at the Munich Kammerspiele. The actors talk about arriving in a foreign country, their traumas and their perspectives. Ayşe Güvendiren, born in Vienna in 1988, grew up in Munich, studied law before switching to directing at the Otto Falckenberg School. Her final production “R-Factor. The Unbelievable” about racism in the cultural sector will be shown on Sunday, June 30th, in the Workshop of the Kammerspiele Here she also directed “The Story of Goliath and David”.
Beautiful and rich
Who is doing what with whom, who has split up, who is causing a scandal and who made the big appearance? News from the world of the rich and beautiful used to be provided by illustrated magazines and tabloids. Today, stars and starlets inform their fans themselves, via platforms such as Instagram or Tiktok. Patricia Riekel75, long-time editor-in-chief of the magazine Colorfulit is “a kind of personal court reporting”. “These are image campaigns that should really be labelled as advertising,” said the Munich native, who is considered the queen of the gossip press, to the German Press Agency.
Child-loving and committed
“Still I rise” is an independent international organization that works to protect and educate children and young people in precarious situations. It was founded in 2018 in a refugee camp on the island of Samos by the Italian journalist Nicolò Govoni. Today the NGO is based in Rome. Since last year there has been a Branch in Munichinitiated by Giovanni Cordara and Tobias OelbaumThe two are colleagues at the European Patent Office in Munich, engineers and fathers. Cordara has two children, Oelbaum four. During the Corona period, Oelbaum was passionately committed to the opening of daycare centers and schools, and with his commitment to “Still I rise” he has remained true to the topic of education. Education basically means the future for young people, says Oelbaum. But it is particularly important to make learning possible for children who grow up in difficult life situations, such as in a Syrian refugee camp or near the Congolese cobalt mines, where the alternative to school would be working in the mine.
The organization, named after a poem by the African-American writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, currently runs schools in Syria, the Republic of Congo, Kenya and Yemen, with others being set up in Colombia and Mumbai, India. The organization is run by volunteers and financed through donations. Govoni promoted this during a visit to Munich last Friday, and Cordara and Oelbaum are organizing events for this purpose.
New and connected
The Munich Biennale is now being organized by the Munich-based Katrin Beck and the South Tyrolean composer Manuela Kerer Both have just taken up their new posts after the last edition of the Festivals for new music theatre under the previous curator duo Daniel Ott and Manos Tsangaris. The festival had taken place under the title “On the way” at various venues in the city. Ott and Tsangaris had been responsible for the program since 2016 and have now ceremoniously handed over their office to their successors. “The Munich Biennale as a festival of the city and for the city will continue to open the window to the world in the spirit of Hans Werner Henze,” says Beck. The musicologist was previously responsible for the artistic operations office in the festival team. Beck studied in Würzburg and Erlangen, works with the Siemens Foundation and the Goethe Institute, for example on the “Music in Africa” project. Kerer also knows Munich well, has realized projects with the Children’s and Youth Museum, the Adult Education Center and worked with the Munich Chamber Orchestra. “Artistic impulses aimed at young audiences and sustainable, collaborative production processes are essential for us,” she says. The next biennale with new leadership will take place in 2026. The new directors would like artistic music education to play a greater role in the future. The networking of the local, national and international music scene in different formats and collaborations should also be intensified.