Highlights: all we need (2007)

"all we need" was an “exhibition about needs, resources and fairness” that was part of "Luxembourg & Greater Region - European Capital of Culture 2007" and for which I provided the title and the basic concept. Furthermore I was responsible - together with Mike Mathias from Luxembourg - for the necessary research on globally important topics. In addition, I organized and coordinated the development of educational materials for the exhibition by an Austrian-Luxembourg group of friends and colleagues.

The exhibition was based on the theory of needs of the Chilean "barefoot" economist Manfred Max-Neef (1932-2019), which I got to know in 1991 at the first Austrian Development Conference. It took more than 15 years for this view of the world to find the right framework conditions to materialize in the form of the exhibition "all we need". This would not have been possible without a long-standing friendship with Robert Garcia, the then general coordinator of "Luxembourg 2007". Many thanks Roga!

You can find more about Manfred Max-Neef in Wikipedia, in English or, in more detail, in Spanish.

Manfred Max-Neef (5th from left) in Salzburg, with the educational team for the exhibition

The exhibition took place in the blower hall ("Halle des Soufflantes") in Belval in the South of Luxembourg, on an area of the Luxembourg steel industry that was not open to the public for almost 100 years before the exhibition.

Today, not even 15 years later, Belval is one of the most important urban development projects in Europe (more information on this at belval.lu).

The exhibition ran from April 19, 2007 to October 28, 2007. It counted 30,000 visitors and was therefore one of the highlights of the year of the European Capital of Culture.

The staging of the exhibition was given to three professional teams from Switzerland, namely Heller Enterprises and Holzer-Kobler Architekturen, both from Zurich, and iart from Basel.

Photos and video
Photo impressions are available from the websites of both Holzer-Kobler Architekturen and iart. And for those interested in a deeper experience the following video filmed by iart takes you on a complete tour through the 10 stations reflecting Manfred Max-Neef’s 10 basic needs (duration 9:15 minutes). Enjoy!

VIDEO-LINK "all we need" (mostly in German, partly in Luxembourgish, partly in English)