6th SILBERSALZ Science & Media Festival in Halle ends with record attendance

The visitors' interest was heightened by the light installation "Pulse" by video artist Filip Roca, which was projected onto Halle's Marktkirche every evening. It was dedicated to the invisible power of time, illuminated deep time and addressed how time can bend.

The concept of SILBERSALZ is to present science and research in a way that is understandable, relaxed and close to the people, and thus to convey scientific knowledge to the audience at eye level. The focus is on major global issues such as democracy, inequality, migration, integration, health and climate change.

With the sixth edition under the motto: "I spy with my little eye,...", a festival programme was created with international film productions, including excellent German premieres, award-winning international installations and exhibits, concerts and scientific discussion formats. They invited visitors on a journey of discovery between man and nature, earth and space, young and old, seeing and understanding, creating and participating.

More than 50 feature films, documentaries and short films were screened and grasped. Many of them, like "Breaking Social", dealt with social inequality and called for a redesign of the building blocks of our society. The documentary "Plastic Fantastic", by director Isa Willinger, confronted its viewers with the global plastic crisis and the festival closing film "The King Said What A Fantastic Machine", was dedicated to our obsession and addiction to images and illustrated how this shapes our behaviour.

The more than 20 talk formats of the festival featured prominent guests, such as the show debate "Space vs. the Deep Sea" with Prof. Dr. Antje Boetius, Director of the Alfred Wegener Institute - Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and Dr. Matthias Maurer, ESA astronaut and scientist. The show debate is available at the cooperation partner MDR in the ARD-Mediathek, just like the talk "The many Traces of Truth", with Dimtra Andritsou, Forensis, and Anasuya Sengupta, Whose Knowledge. In "All in one, but never just the one", political scientist Emilia Roig, author Alice Hasters and journalist Hadija Haruna-Oelker discussed identity, identity crises and how to deal with them.

Internationally awarded exhibitions and VR installations made the smallest microscopic cell life, as in "Cell Worlds" (Renaud Pourpre, Terence Saulnier, Youenn Lerb, France), tangible in a fascinating way. With Extended Reality in "Jamais Vu" (Ben Andrews, Emma Roberts, Australia), the optical-neurological state of migraine became impressively visible. The issue of artificial intelligence bias was problematised in the interactive film "Consensus Gentium" (Karen Palmer, UK). The VR installation "Goliath: Playing with Reality" (Anagram, Great Britain), which was awarded in the category "Immersive Science" at the SILBERSALZ Science & Media Awards 2023, showed the important role that computer games can also play in a therapeutic context, especially in the treatment of people suffering from schizophrenia.

Performances and concerts with renowned artists attracted music and science fans to venues such as the Georg-Friedrich-Händel-Halle, where the exclusive concert of the Johannes Motschmann Trio and the Japanese "Alive Painting" artist Akiko Nakayama took place. At the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, biologist and DJ Dominik Eulberg presented his biodiversity show, and in her sound performance, artist Kat Austen turned arctic water into an instrument at the Kaufhaus.Club. There, the Science Notes also thrilled the audience: Invisible, accompanied by the live set of musician Martin Stimming, thrilled the audience, as did Professor Bertolt Meyer as a DJ and with his podcast People of Science.

With experiments and creative hands-on stations for people of all ages, the Science Market on Saturday offered organisations and companies, including the German Aerospace Institute DLR and Jugend forscht, the opportunity to present themselves to a wide audience.

A special hands-on activity for all visitors of the festival, big and small, was the 4 x 15 metre "...and that's..." wall on the ground floor of the department stores', next to the Kurzfilm.Club for children. Here, visitors could leave impressions and perceptions of their search for the unknown as a statement.

The record attendance of over 30,000 visitors in this festival year once again underlines the importance and relevance as the largest science and media festival of its kind in Germany. The Documentary Campus, initiator of the festival together with the Robert Bosch Stiftung, draws an all-round positive conclusion: "We knew that this combination of location and programme would be the success factor for the sixth edition of SILBERSALZ in providing the public with access to science and media at eye level. We are very proud of the result and the doubling of our visitor numbers from the festival year 2022. Our thanks go to all those who made it possible to transform Halle into a place of experience and inspiration in search of answers, to the big questions of our time in diverse media and formats," Festival Director Donata von Perfall sums up the five days of the festival.

The seventh edition of the festival will take place from 30 October - 03 November 2024 in Halle (Saale).