European Silk Road

The European Silk Road app is a digital platform for a wide range of artistic perspectives and creative forms of expression.

What would a European Silk Road look like if it existed? Would it be an ecological project? A narrative of values? Or a cultural participation project? The European Silk Road app calls on individual artists, collectives, cultural producers and initiators to address the idea and vision of a European Silk Road. It allows them to contribute their own very personal ideas and perspectives. Spanning borders, cultures and time zones, a growing mosaic of artistic interpretations will be assembled to take a fun, but critical artistic approach to bringing the concept of a European Silk Road into being.

In a time of war and climate crisis, the European Silk Road (european-silk-road.eu) is creating a major vision of a modern high-speed rail network and a green infrastructure project. It will connect the industrial centres on the western side of the continent to the highly populated regions in the east. This aims to strengthen the European Project in the face of overarching power projections. Seeking to inspire artistic debate and free dialogue, the European Silk Road app revolves around very specific values that the democratic Europe stands for or could stand for. The ESR app purposefully provides creative people with an open catalogue of possible basic values as a source of inspiration and an invitation to free interpretation. This “value index” lists principles that are traditionally associated with art, such as “truth” and “beauty”. The aim is to invite the other to create his/her personal – and strengthen their own basic quality while adding the necessary intensity to positive ideas – like those behind the European Silk Road.

The contribution module allows anyone to incorporate the artwork they create in this European idea, publishing it within the context of this future vision. In this way, hidden potential (i.e. the quiet, frequently unheard voices) is identified, sounded out and brought to the surface. This gives the artists an opportunity to set out on a journey together through this theme.

The fruit of these efforts grow in the app

Thanks to our partners, for example, the Orchestra della Toscana, the Madrigal Choir of Bucharest and the Silk Road Symphony Orchestra, we have found numerous artistic interpretations for the idea of a European Silk Road through the app. Jonas Burgert, Andrea Gränert, Christian Achenbach, Helene Moltke-Leth, Olga Weiß, Ralf Hoyer, Heloise Werner and Misagh Joolaee are just some of the originators of these works.

Diversity also needs to be reflected in the structure. At the very beginning, we therefore gathered the 15-strong “Artistic Recommendation Group” to curate the artistic contributions. The pieces of art emerging from a wide range of disciplines, cultures and identities have allowed us to extend the reach in a unique way.

This Meta app is based on a continuously growing platform that spans generations. All content is free of charge and can be accessed without ads.

It features descriptions of each contribution in several languages. Topics and projects are explained using images of the latest personal artistic work. In addition, you can listen to audio files at numerous POIs (points of interest). You will discover image galleries, essays, poems, films, audio journeys etc. that often reveal hidden interpretations and qualities.

The in-app guidance has been enhanced with various options that allow users to display different contribution categories etc. Furthermore, you can filter the large number of contributions according to interest.

Functions:
- Localised texts in German and English
- Picture galleries
- Video
- Audio
- Audio walks and digital sound journeys in Podcast format
- Sorting according to categories
- Topic-based tab view with search function