CULTURE OF SOLIDARITY

Culture of Solidarity is the umbrella term for the exhibition partnerships that show the festival outside of Baden – in Tulln, in Bratislava and, for the first time this year, in Budapest. 

During November, as part of the European Month of Photography (EMOP) in Bratislava, a kind of best-of retrospective of the festival will be presented, while the winning photos of the Global Peace Photo Award will be shown in Budapest. 

The Global Peace Photo Award will be held from 1 May to 15 June 2025 at Madách Imre tér square in Budapest. Inspired by the 1911 Nobel Peace Prize winners Alfred Fried and Tobias Asser, the award recognises and promotes photographers from around the world whose images capture the human quest for a peaceful world and the search for beauty and goodness in our lives. The prize is awarded to those photographs that best express the idea that our future lies in peaceful coexistence.

Inner peace, peaceful coexistence, peace within a community, peace between nations, international peace policy – what do we associate with these? The Global Peace Photo Award, which was established in 2013 as the Alfred Fried Photography Award, showcases the various facets of peaceableness and completes the image of humanity with its good sides. It honours the images that tell of successes instead of failures, of empathy instead of hatred, of preservation instead of destruction, of encouragement instead of agony and of the human right to beauty.

In the Tulln Gardens, Gerald Mansberger and Markus Eisl are showing the exhibition ‘The Human Footprint’: ‘With the “View from Space”, we want to show what we have on our planet, how beautiful and at the same time vulnerable it is, and also how we treat it.’

From densely populated cities to the inhospitable deserts of the Sahara and the polar deserts of the Antarctic, we humans have now left our mark, our footprint, almost everywhere, and in doing so have transformed the Earth to a very different extent.

No technology is as suitable as satellite remote sensing when it comes to showing our impact on the environment. Today, high-quality cameras constantly take pictures of the Earth’s surface from an altitude of several hundred kilometres. Images with a resolution of up to 30 centimetres are continuously being delivered from the focal points of human activity, such as pulsating megacities, from small towns and villages, as well as from remote regions of the Earth that have hardly been touched by humans. By comparing these images with older ones, the development of the human footprint can be recorded in detail.

In addition to the content of the satellite images, it is always the aesthetic impression they convey that makes the images a unique combination of contemporary document and visually impressive photographs.

In collaboration with satellite operators such as Maxar, Airbus and European Space Imaging, Markus Eisl and Gerald Mansberger have designed numerous exhibitions, non-fiction books, atlases and the illustrated book series ‘Human Footprint’, which deal with different aspects of this topic. 
See: www.eovision.at/bildbaende-und-atlanten/