The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is cooperating with Messe Frankfurt for the first time to organize an international and interdisciplinary festival of culture to be held 12 - 16 July 2006. Over five consecutive days, five highly charged, controversial themes of our present-day cultural reality will be presented and discussed. The event brings together various fields: a scholarly conference with lectures, debates, and presentations; a culture club with an extensive program of art, film, and music; and a children's academy offer young visitors a number of workshops and projects to provide an opportunity to reflect on the themes discussed in the scholarly section.

Culture Zone 06 is conceived as a platform for conversations and debates about current culture. The goal is to develop various perspectives on the intellectual and cultural discourse and offering a forum for the exchange of heterogeneous approaches.

The event will take place at the Forum of Messe Frankfurt and on the open area in front of it - the “agora.” The whole site will serve as a lively space for information, discussion, and events and be transformed into a meeting place.

Structure
The site for the event - the Forum at the Messe Frankfurt - offers an opportunity to combine various elements of the conference:

Conference
The conference offers lectures, conversations, and panel discussions with internationally renowned scholars, artists, and journalists that are grouped into modules with a central theme each day. It takes place in Panorama Hall 1 on the upper floor of the Forum.

Culture Club
In the Culture Club the themes discussed in the scholarly format will be addressed in performances, readings, artistic projects, musical events (concerts, DJ sets), a fashion show, and an open-air cinema. Lounges offer a place to rethink and discuss the lectures. The Culture Club will be located on the ground floor of the Forum. The design of the Club was developed by the architects’ collective raumlabor_berlin. A series of artists such as Sachiko Abe, Martin Creed, DJ Dan Solo (Kaliber 7), Eno Henze and the Nomads & Residents’ Traveling Magazine Table will design temporary interventions or performances for the Culture Club.

Children’s academy
The Children’s Academy is designed for children and young people of school age. Following the themes of the conference, experts will be questioned, interviews conducted, debates and discussions stimulated. In this way, children will be introduced to complex themes from the world of culture, and subtle and difficult themes will be treated in ways that children can understand. In addition, children and young people will be offered a chance to meet concept artists, sculptors, and painters in the context of the Academy’s “Kunstbasis” program and thus experience art and culture directly and with a focus on their sensory dimensions in workshops and various projects. The exhibition “We are Artists” will present projects realized by school classes at the Schirn. The City of Frankfurt’s “Hip-Hop-Mobil” will be the Academy’s guest. Concept: imone Boscheinen (project manager), Irmi Rauber, Katja Helpensteller, Susanne Hesse

12 July 2006 - Waves, Trends, and Early Warning Systems
The ability to look into the future seems to be an unachievable desideratum. Predictions -which for structural reasons must necessarily remain in the realm of the speculative - determine the psychology of a society. They focus on every conceivable field - from climate to health and the economy. Research on trends and the future is causing nearly every aspect of our lives to revolve around the future. Instruments for prediction are being developed, megatrends are being identified, and again and again the question arises how the new emerges. But how does one negotiate a cultural future? With the wind of modernism’s fetishization of the new at its back, today’s cultural production alternates between avant-garde and nostalgia, between fashions and forms of reflexivity. Is it better, as Brecht said, to line up with the bad new over the good old? The aesthetics of outdoing the past and keeping up to date found in pop and hype would seem to have come down clearly on the side of the new. Even within the operating system of art, the new seems to devalue faster and faster as a result of inflation, and the trial heat of names in the jungle of strategies existing side by side seems to decay with ever shorter half-lives. Symptomatically, the plexus of the new, the unexpected, and the eternally the same is mirrored in its fashions. Is it impossible for modern society to exist without fashions? Is temporality a stabilizing force? What strategies can be diagnosed and analyzed against this backdrop? With what means do the various cultural agents operate?

13 July 2006 - Everything Thinks, Except Human Beings
“Id speaks” is not just Sigmund Freud’s assumption, which has long since been confirmed; at least since Jacques Lacan and the French poststructuralists, the reservations about a substantial ego have left behind considerable scratches on the concepts of subjectivity and human free will. The ego has long since seized to look like the master of its own house. In the course of the subsequent debate - which affected more than just broad swaths in a wide range of research fields - deep traces have been left in the visual arts and literature as well. Was the substantial ego a mistake? Nevertheless, it does not seem to be time for alarmism. People are doing a balancing act between autonomous structures for action and the technical extension of the self. Over the course of the twentieth century, brain research increasingly had something to say in this field. In that respect, this question, more than any other, has become an exemplary meeting point between the natural sciences and the humanities, between theoretical and empirical studies. On the other hand, prostheses have been developed that extend and displace precisely the authorities that have been stripped from the ego. There are now vigilant carpets, talking sweaters, intelligent houses, and soccer competitions between robots. Are these things a form of reprieve or rather a threat of further loss of control, an expansion of infinitely intertwined systems? What are the consequences in terms of control and responsibility? Are uncritical positivism and progress at odds here? How do the visual arts respond? The role of the image and of image-producing processes have an interesting role in this debate, not least in the sense that they can help to make brain research a focus of contemporary culture as a whole, not just of specialists.

14 July 2006 - Good-Bye, Subculture; Hello, Success Culture
Questions of culture are always ultimately questions of the structures that constitute it. Today the idea of cultural is linked above all to the question of identity, whether it be the collective identity of a group or a concept of society as the sum of diverse, heterogeneous cultural realities. Against this backdrop, it too becomes a contested area. What is it that adopts cultural form here? Who participates in cultural reality? What finds acceptance and validity in culture? What form does a critique of aesthetic culture take? What cultural products determine meaning? All of this is dependent on cultural channels and fields of action, on producers and consumers of culture in the field of tension of mass society and media society, of high aesthetic culture and pop, of institutionalization in the fields of art and science, of expert authority and democratized information society. It becomes necessary to question the mechanisms of cultural transformation. What made the art market a metaphorical success story? How did the blogging of the subculture become an instrument of the mainstream?

15 July 2006 - Rethinking Spirituality: The Return of The Religious
Seem to encounter modernism as something almost entirely secularized, and today’s “postsecular” society would seem to be anything but religious. And yet religion in the narrower sense seems to have become an urgent topic today, raising widely different sets of questions. On the one hand, a growing political influence of religious orthodoxies of very different faiths can be observed within an equally broad range of social models; on the other hand, naturalistic views of the world are also spreading. It becomes necessary to question more than just the meaning of politicized religion in the form of an Islamism that is prepared to use violence or that of evangelical fundamentalism in the United States. Above all, it becomes necessary to question the function of the religions and of religious communication for our society. Culture plays a central role in this, since questions of meaning have largely been delegated to culture in a world of denominational and religious pluralism. Have been reached the end of the usefulness of this model in which religious motives can, for structural reasons, no longer be transferred to other functional contexts? They seem to be increasing in a world that is becoming more radical. The question of the relationship between religion and modernism thus becomes more pointed. It becomes necessary to question the role of the media, of representations of increasingly religious motives. It becomes necessary to question representations in a wide range of cultural segments, in literature, and not least in the visual arts, with their centuries-old history of sacred art.

16 July 2006 - Me, INC., Versus The ’Hood: The Culture of Community
The concept of the community is being overworked and is looking for new descriptions. In today’s culture, it has been subjected to acute polarizations. The isolation in the globalized society with its Me, Inc.’s pulls it in one direction; the incantations of a mass media society in another. Here in Germany, communality is staged with great publicity success in campaigns like “You are Germany,” “The greatest national team of all times,” or “There is no me here. Here there is only us.” Emphasis is placed on collectives that are supposed to recreate solid bonds, fast footing, and dependable orientation for individuals who have been abandoned and disappointed by “the society” or by “socio-technological systems.” The notion of Germany as a Leitkultur (defining culture) can be considered the dominant program of these new communities. The concept of community has also made its way in the so-called subcultures and pop cultures, along with ’hood and family. There too one observes that the bourgeois concept of the individual is being devalued in favor of a culture of community whose program can extend from fashions in clothing and hair styles to the lingua franca and styles of dancing and that, despite all its coolness, can certainly be repressive as well. This section will explore the questions why communities and their defining cultures now dominate the semantics of social self-descriptions and which functions they fulfill.