Water is a human right - Millerntor Gallery #9

For the 9th time in a row, Hamburg’s second Bundesliga division team FC. St. Pauli turns their stadium into an art gallery and music festival for the good cause. The motto of this year's Millerntor Gallery is “Water is a human right” and more than 100 artists turned the stadium into a gallery with the goal that “Art creates water”.

The beneficiary of the art sale profits is “Viva con Agua”, a non profit organization founded by former FC St. Pauli Player Benjamin Adrion, that focuses on ensuring that all people worldwide have access to clean drinking water. The opening night art auction already spilled €270.000 into a new clean water project for Mozambique.

The Millerntor Gallery is an annual art festival and diverse meeting space that brings artists from many different nations as well as wealthy art buyers from the corporate world together. The spirit at the festival is positive and united for the good cause. It’s also a reminder that those of us who never have to think about clean drinking water, as it’s a seemingly unlimited resource and never more than the next water fauscett away, are very fortunate. But recent, hot and dry summers have also caused water supply issues here in Germany.

The dialogue about clean drinking water may eventually hit closer to home than many are aware of right now. Therefore, the artistic dialogue about this increasingly scarce resource may just come up at the right time for many of us as a wakeup call.

I would like to point you to the work of my good friend and brilliant photographer Stefan Groenveld who has documented some of the Viva con Agua projects in Afrika in recent years:

Wasser ist Leben (Water is life): https://www.stefangroenveld.de/2019/wasser-ist-leben/

Uganda: Kampala und der Norden: https://www.stefangroenveld.de/2017/uganda-kampala-und-der-norden/

My images of this very colorful event are reduced to black and white to give you a different point of view:

Hamburg's Streets Unstaged - A Photo Project

At the end of 2016, I've decided to start a street photography project in Hamburg for 2017.

The goal of the project was to document the beauty of the unstaged daily life on Hamburg's streets throughout the year from an artistic and classic street photography point of view. During the project, I've captured more than a thousand photos and walked hundreds of miles on Hamburg's streets.

On December 31th, 2017 I've created a short video with a selection of 4 images from each month of the project that you can watch below.

I'm currently in the process to decide how this project will be shared from here on: Maybe a book, an exhibition, or a fine art print series..?

G20 Summit 2017 in Germany - Hamburg Under Siege

Germany is the host of the G20 summit talks in 2017 and Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Hamburg’s first Mayor, Olaf Scholz, to host this event in Hamburg. Olaf Scholz agreed and assured safety to the public. He even claimed that: “On July 9th, some people will be surprised that the summit is already over.”

Hamburg is known to be an open, diverse and international city due to its large and 828 years old harbor. And because of this, Hamburg also carries the nickname "Gate to the World."

But when it comes to hosting the G20 summit in Hamburg, most residents are opposed to having this event in their metropolitan city. While there is general support for the idea that leaders of the world should talk to each other and try to effectively tackle the urgent inequity and environmental challenges of our planet, the majority also thinks that this event should not have been hosted in the middle of our metropolitan city, but rather in a more remote place where the implications and security concerns would have been much less to worry about.

Additionally, the event takes place in the most alternative part of town that had a long history of, let's say, not reacting well to gentrification, turbo capitalism, and inequality of minorities. To these residents, it's seen as a blatant provocation to host this event tight in the middle of their “hood” and adds fuel to a G20 summit event that already has a long history of protests and violence.

With this photo series, I documented the "under siege" area with my camera just days before the G20 summit started on July 7th & 8th. Many residents of Hamburg foresaw the riots, but the first mayor, Olaf Scholz, did not. Or at least he found that the benefits of hosting the G20 in Hamburg outweighed the potential harm.

Update: Did the misjudgment of the G20 in Hamburg hurt Olaf Scholz politically? Not really: In March 2018, Olaf Scholz was elected minister of finance and Vice-Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, next to Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Update 2: On December 8th, 2021 Olaf Scholz was elected as Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany…