Mr. Sievers, the Year of Germany in India began in the autumn. How was the response at the launch?
Chancellor Merkel had officially launched the Year of Germany on 31 May 2011 in Delhi with a concert by the Young Euro Classic Orchestra. The actual opening ceremony then took place at the end of September with a series of high-profile concerts and dance events staged in parallel in the seven Indian megacities of New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The biggest attraction for the audience was the open-air encounter between the Indian percussion star Sivamani and Germany’s top solo percussionist Christoph Haberer in front of 3,000 enthusiastic fans in New Delhi’s most popular park. The Indian classical music fans reacted with similar enthusiasm to the concert tours of Philharmonie Merck and the Quintet 5 Beaufort of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie. An even greater attraction for hundreds of thousands of people in Kolkata was Gregor Schneider’s installation called It’s All Rheydt, a further development of his Haus u r, which won him the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Biennale. In October Schneider was the first foreign artist to be allowed to design a pandal (shrine) for Durga Puja, the most important Hindu festival in Bengal in honour of the goddess Durga.
How wide-ranging is the programme and what highlights can people in India look forward to?
In line with the Year of Germany’s integrated approach, hundreds of events and projects covering all areas of bilateral cooperation – culture, science, education, business and politics – will take place between September 2011 and the end of 2012. Our website at www.germany-and-india.com provides a good overview. In the course of the year, big names from the German art scene will exhibit in India. Some will also be working here – for example, Rebecca Horn, Wolfgang Laib, Eberhard Havekost, Tino Sehgal and Heidi Specker. In Mumbai the curator Adrienne Göhler will show her unique exhibition “Examples to Follow!” – or, as she calls it, her “expeditions in aesthetics and sustainability”. It will be augmented with works by important contemporary Indian artists, who – like the others involved in this project – will give an artistic slant to innovations in the field of renewable energies, climate change, urban development and ecology. January 2012 will see what many consider to be the ultimate concert tour of the year: Bollywood star and Oscar winner A.R. Rahman will present his compositions with the Babelsberg Film Orchestra to huge audiences in five Indian cities. Enthusiasm for his music is so great in India that his concerts fill entire stadiums and are broadcast live on TV. One of the major events in the second half of the Year of Germany will be the opening of the German House for Science and Innovation in New Delhi, which will unite under one roof the most important German research institutions and universities represented in India, and help network them with Indian academic, business and development-policy partner institutions. The 13th Asia-Pacific Conference of German Business will be held in Gurgaon, a boom town on the outskirts of Delhi, in early November 2012. This is the most important German-Asian networking meeting between governments and industry in the Asia-Pacific region.
A core element is the “Mobile Space” that will be travelling through key cities. What does it look like? Who designed it? Which cities will it visit in 2012? And what will it have to offer?
The Munich-based artist Markus Heinsdorff has designed an ensemble of 15 beautiful pavilions, which together form a kind of “Germany Plaza” covering an area of over 2,000 square metres. The Plaza will be in major metropolitan cities for ten days each. In the pavilions – highly attractive membrane-covered steel structures – our business partners and project sponsors will present information and ideas on “CitySpaces”, the central theme of the Year of Germany. At the same time there will be special pavilions hosting a cultural and conference programme with a wide variety of events that will be different at each location. We expect the Plaza to become the main crowd puller during the Year of Germany. The Plaza will be opened in April 2012 in Mumbai, before moving on to other cities including Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Delhi.
One of the main target groups is described as “urban, education-oriented, English-speaking young Indians”. How do you intend to reach them?
Educated, English-speaking urban young people are the main target group not only for the Year of Germany, but also for businesses, education and research – and for the work of the Goethe-Institut. About 90% of the Goethe-Instituts’ course participants are younger than 25; and most of the people who come to our exhibitions, jazz concerts, techno/club evenings and documentary-film screenings are under 30. The same applies to the DAAD’s scholarship holders and the candidates for the dual training courses at the Indo-German Training Centres, organized by the Indo-German Chamber of Commerce. The project sponsors and business partners are therefore using appropriate formats to tailor the programme of the Year of Germany to this target group – also using social media, of course. However, the aim is not to focus one-sidedly on youth, because it is evident that many important decision-makers with close links to Germany in all areas of the Indian economy and society are also a key and numerically important target group of this Year of Germany.///
