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:
