Frankfurter Buchmesse launches campaign to celebrate culture as a driver of innovation

Frankfurter Buchmesse is the international publishing industry’s biggest trade fair, with over 7,500 exhibitors from 109 countries, around 285,000 visitors, over 4,000 events and some 10,000 accredited journalists and bloggers in attendance.

It is the most important international marketplace for content, from novels and children’s books to academic databases and stories for films, games and virtual reality experiences. Publishing professionals from around the world meet here with partners from the technology sector and from related creative and cultural industries, sparking new partnerships and business models.

The idea is to reaffirm culture in its capacity to solve our global challenges and to strengthen its role in international debates. At the heart of this year’s discussion and the campaign Create Your Revolution is an urgent appeal: Without culture, there is no future! The campaign focuses on these central topics: activism, language, living with machines, trust, futurism, identity, sustainability, and education.

As part of the campaign, the interactive festival THE ARTS+/B3 that takes place during Frankfurt Book Fair, is inviting change makers from the culture and creative industries to submit their ideas and contribute to the programme and exhibition. Anyone from the culture and creative industries working on loud, bold, and revolutionary ideas in the named areas is invited to submit proposals for integration into the programme and exhibition of THE ARTS+/B3 festival.

In 2018, THE ARTS+ presented an interdisciplinary programme with inspiring keynote talks by national and international speakers such as Galit Ariel, JiaJia Fei and Frank Thelen, and exceptional performances by cyborg Moon Ribas, holographic pop star Maya Kodes and 3D Drum Girl LIZZY.

In 2019, THE ARTS+ will once again offer five days of inspiration from 16 to 20 October 2019. Now in its fourth year, THE ARTS+ has launched a unique partnership with the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, an event conceived by the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (HfG) for artists, media professionals and scientists from around the world.

Create Your Revolution lives up to the success of the award-winning campaign ‘On the Same Page’. Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2018 and to mark Frankfurter Buchmesse’s 70th edition in that year, Frankfurter Buchmesse and Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels launched On the Same Page with the support of the United Nations (UN) and Amnesty International and various other partners. This initiative not only put human rights into focus but also called on the international book and media industry to become actively involved.

This year, again with a number of international partners, Frankfurter Buchmesse will be taking a closer look at the meaning and future of culture and will revolutionise it.