Campus for Design and Art

Ceremony 15 Years Campus of Art and Design

On 7 July, the Design Campus invited guests to a festive event entitled "Moving into the Future! It was the first public event after a pandemic break of more than a year, and not only the host, Dean Prof. Dr. Matthias Sieveke, but also the approximately 40 invited guests from politics and culture enjoyed the evening of cultural events.

Among others, Lord Mayor Wolfram Leibe and Dr. Katharina Popanda from the Kulturstiftung Rheinland-Pfalz (Rhineland-Palatinate Cultural Foundation), who have been friends and supporters of Campus Gestaltung for many years, were guests, as were the director of the European Art Academy Trier, Simon Santschi, and Teneka Beckers from the TUFA Culture and Communication Centre. There is good cooperation with both institutions in the form of collaborative projects. The director of the Mosel Music Festival, Tobias Scharfenberger, also attended the event. Just in time for the ceremony, he was able to marvel at the sculptural seating that students under the supervision of Prof. Jörg Obergfell had built from unused festival event catalogues from the pandemic year 2020 in the sense of upcycling.

15 years of the Design Campus: today's Department of Design with its six disciplines was founded in 2005/2006, at that time 10 disciplines were combined into 5, the still relatively young Intermedia Design course was added in 2009. "But a campus is more than just a department, the whole is more than the sum of its parts," says the university president, Prof. Dr. Dorit Schumann. "Together you have succeeded in building up the science location Campus Gestaltung as our anchor in the city and in networking it with the arts and cultural scene in Trier, in the state, nationally and internationally." She also emphasised that with the expansion of Campus Gestaltung around the old public prosecutor's office, according to the current plan at the end of 2023, the city centre campus will grow even further. "The campus will become a meeting place, the networking with the city will become even stronger."

Sustainability and digitalisation as topics of the future
In a subsequent review and outlook, Dean Prof. Dr. Sieveke showed how the Campus Gestaltung has developed over the past 15 years and explained his visions for the future. He also emphasised the planned expansion of the campus to include the House of Architecture. "For me, a campus means the development of an urban quarter rather than an organisational unit," Sieveke said. Two big topics in the future for him are sustainability on the one hand and digitalisation on the other. Via video message, the managing director of TransFair, Dieter Overath, awarded the "Fairtrade University" label to the Campus Gestaltung. With this seal, the topic of social justice and ecological sustainability is increasingly placed in the focus of university life. On the future topic of artificial intelligence, Mr Sieveke was pleased to report that a large amount of funding had recently been approved. From this, an interdisciplinary professor for Artificial Intelligence in Design will be established in the future. "We are working on concepts where we try to harmonise analogue work and digitalisation," Mr Sieveke concluded.

Prof. Dr. Michael Jäckel, President of the University of Trier, could be won for an impulse lecture during the event evening. Under the title "Backwards understood, forwards lived? The Reawakening of Society", Jäckel illuminated the time of the pandemic from a philosophical, sociological and artistic perspective. "The Corona crisis turns out to be a motor, a kind of renaissance experience in the 21st century. Maybe it will change the way we look at the beauty of the world."

At the end of the evening there was a 30-minute concert from classical to modern, thus music was also integrated as part of art and culture at the Design Campus. Louisa Sieveke (16) on bassoon and flute and Ringaudas Ignotas Daraškevičius (17) on grand piano made the atmospheric Art Nouveau auditorium sound perfect. Both are this year's 1st prize winners of the national competition Jugend Musiziert.

The next event in the anniversary year will be the "50 Years of Trier University of Applied Sciences" ceremony at the main Schneidershof campus on 16 July 2021 at 5.30 pm. This ceremony will also be broadcast as a livestream. All information at: www.hochschule-trier.de/jubilaeum/detailansicht/zentraler-festakt-in-trier

The complete stream of the event evening "15 Years of Campus Design" was broadcast nationwide by OK54 Bürgerrundfunk and can be viewed on this page or as a recording on youtube.

08. July 2021