ㅤThe Visual Art Section of North America: 08/26/23

Saturday, August 26, 2023

That Good May Become Manitoba Conference 2023

THAT GOOD MAY BECOME

A Festival of Initiative in Manitoba’s Interlake Region, Canada.

August 10-16, 2023

It all began in the rain, yet Peter Selg reminded us in his opening lecture, that the day when Rudolf Steiner began the Christmas conference in 1923, it was very cold in the Schreinerei building and that many had to stand outside in the rain to listen as the hall was too small to offerspace for all! There was also a rainstorm during the laying of the Foundation Stone in 1913.

Did this give us comfort? Were we in good company, was this a good omen? Our guests from the Goetheanum seemed very cheerful.

Spirit Remembering Human Soul you live in the limbs

The visuals you see as part of this written contribution are large cotton banners that were painted during the festival by eight participants. This was prepared for by some of us who set the stage, initially for the Novalis fairytale Hyacinth and Rosebud, a collaboration between the Literary and the Visual Art Sections.

Because they showed an amazing versatility and through the lighting created different moods, they ended up accompanying all three evening

performances. Every time they seemed to create a new soul space for what was to come. In a way one could say, they reflected an archetypal journey, our human journey through time and space.

These seven images also contributed to creating a living ‘Goetheanum in the West’ in a hall that had very little aesthetic qualities to offer.

In this way the collaboration between the Literary and Visual Art Sections became a gift for the entire Festival of Initiative where human beings came together in mutual sharing, weaving a tapestry of warm hearts and good will.

Spirit Sensing Human Soul you live in the Heart and Lung

An additional gift, quite by surprise was the offering of coloured light! This created magic and like in a eurythmy performance, the images began to dance and carried us into a soul-spiritexperience of an otherworldly existence.

Spirit Beholding

Human Soul you live in the resting head

So, as we lived and worked and shared together in rain and wind and sun we turned to Nature

and Culture as our two fields of activity and responsibility. We laid a Foundation Stone in the Canadian mid-west, the place ‘between,’ the place of wide-open spaces, where the east and

west meet to create the middle. That ‘middle,’ as we heard in one of the lectures given, has thetask to balance and thereby bring healing to the danger of two opposites tearing apart the verycontinent! How can this become a creative, artistic path? Practice, practice, practice!

“If I had to do it again I would do it all though the arts” Rudolf Steiner

BANNERS: Regine Kurek & Friends