bink at the Green Culture Festival 2025 in Essen

This question accompanied us at the Green Culture Festival 2025 in Essen and it resonates. 600 people, an impressive festival site at the Zeche Zollverein, art, culture, sustainability and lots of honest, open discussions about the future of culture. We were there for bink - Bavaria's initiative for sustainable culture and say: it was definitely worth it.

The festival not only offered an impressive setting, but above all honest, open discussions about the future of culture. And about how it can be made ecologically, socially and economically sustainable.

Highlights? There were many, a small selection:

• Networking: Our colleagues Charlotte Stegmayer and Sivanne Burbulla met representatives from other federal states as well as the Sustainability Action Network, for example kultur.klima.nrw and the Service Agency for Culture and Sustainability from Schleswig-Holstein.
• Sustainability strategy live: PACT Zollverein showed how diverse sustainability can be conceived and implemented: From goats on the site to wild bee projects and autonomous cargo bikes.
• Rethinking mobility: An impulse from Dortmund was dedicated to the issue of sustainable transportation with very specific solutions.
• Building culture in transition: Do we need to build new buildings at all or can we make better use of existing spaces? Kampnagel Hamburg, the Pina Bausch Center in Wuppertal and the Martin-Gropius-Bau were among the sites discussed.
• Data as a basis: no sustainable transformation without key figures. How sustainability can be measured in culture was also a topic.

The festival was rounded off by an evening stage program with the Orchestra of Change and an impressive performance by spoken word artist Jessy James LaFleur.

We not only took away valuable ideas, but also met many familiar and new faces from the cultural and creative industries support network - and once again felt that it is worth thinking ahead together. And: Zeche Zollverein is not only a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but also living proof of how change can succeed.