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We are keen on non-predictable, unexpected and surprising thoughts and associations about OUBEYs work by scientists, researchers, futurists, philosophers, sportsmen and children. We encourage these non-art-experts to share their response with us while a camera is running. And OUBEYs paintings enable them to let loose and enjoy the experience of discovery. Once they agree, their video gets published and may encourage and enable others to find their very own and personal access to OUBEYs art and hopefully to art in general. This approach of OUBEY MINDKISS is definitely unique and pioneer.

To get an impression, just have a look at the pics below.

Are you curious to see the videos? Just visit the Encounters with OUBEY and make your choice.

See some examples in this photoline: OUBEY MINDKISS Book // Mirror Invite // USB stick, booklet and bag of the OUBEY Experience Film // OUBEY Calendar 2011 // “Growing” Invite Global Encounter Tour // Map of Expanding Universe // Transparent Invite 5thAnniversary.
Thanks to Stefan Sagmeister, Sagmeister & Walsh // Roy Rub &Seth Labenz, Topos Graphics // JoeShouldice, @YesYesYes // Flo Gaertner – Magma Design Studio

Your friendship and contribution makes OUBEY MINDKISS to be special and unique – as OUBEY himself and his art always have been and still are.

(just click on the pictures above to get to the full photo album)

This universe emerged from OUBEYs overwhelmingly fertile legacy and started with a kind of “not knowing what will happen”, just following and sticking to the track that OUBEY himself had consequently followed throughout his short life.

“Everything is connected with everything” OUBEY once said. Though every single step and activity of the MINDKISS Project stands independently for itself, it also stands “pars pro toto”. All of them together make up a whole where every piece is connected to every other piece in a way. The complete ensemble represents complexity with all its qualities and challenges.

It´s based on clear radical principles, consequence and patience on the one hand, and driven by its radical open-mindedness and interest in the creative contributions by others worldwide.

Using the internet as main communication channel for the presentation of OUBEYs art, MINDKISS became an interactive, intercultural and experimental global platform, gaining a constantly growing community and developing more and more self dynamical power.

If you want to know more about the foundation from which OUBEYs work derived, please click the link below and view the 4 minutes short film “OUBEY Complexity”.

On the 18th of December 2015 our experimental workshop at NIAAD in Uganda was opened by Dr. Bruno, Dagmar Woyde-Koehler and Dr. Kizito. 60 participants – composed of NIAAD students and various Ugandan artists – contributed their artworks, inspired by OUBEYs original works. They expressed their thoughts and associations on OUBEYs paintings VISUALLY by creating their own paintings. The atmosphere at our experimental workshop was as relaxed as intense. Very joyful for everyone. That´s one of the huge differences between the OUBEY MINDKISS approach of presenting and sharing and the approach of established museums and galleries.

More than 60 paintings were created last Friday at the OUBEY Encounter Session. 3 of them were chosen by the MINDKISS project to travel further on with the Global Encounter Tour and be testimonial of the fruitful and inspirational encounter between OUBEYs paintings and Ugandan artists. Thanks to everybody who participated for this unique and enriching way of sharing and spreading the idea of OUBEY MINDKISS!

On the 19th of December  2015 the exhibition at NIAAD was open to the public free of charge. We had so many intense and delightful talks with so many people at this OUBEY Encounter Session. So many posts and sharings by participants of the OUBEY Experimental Encounter Session were published these days – thanks to all of you for sharing and liking.

 

Find exciting pics of this stopover of the OUBEY Global Art Tour on Social Media and more details in our next OUBEY newsletter, which will be released in the end of January.

“What we need today are not tunnel vision thinkers but inquiring free-ranging minds because such minds are best fitted to cope with complexity”. This was one of the key points made by Prof. Peter Kruse in his address at the opening of the Berlin exhibition of the OUBEY Global Encounter Tour in March 2013.

Peter Kruse is well known in Germany for his research into how self-organizing systems and intelligent networks perform and function, and for his perceptive cultural analysis – as well as for his at times provoking and highly controversial ideas. From his own fresh and unfamiliar vantage point, he cast new light on OUBEY and the idiosyncratic maturation process that gave birth to his art, a process, as he underlined, that was shaped and molded by the instincts and capabilities of an inquiring free-ranging mind.

OUBEYs art is now presented at this year’s Drucker Forum in an exceptional setting that at the same time offers a special kind of resonance space. People from all over the world concerned with the problems of complexity management are gathering in Vienna for two days of sophisticated debate and exchange on the level of written and spoken communication. They will be discussing new approaches, models and concepts in an effort to identify what can be done to enable managers to deal more successfully and more efficiently with the challenges of increasing complexity and dynamics. In the midst of these encounters and exchanges a number of OUBEYs paintings will make their own silent contribution, in a universal language that has no need of words, to an understanding of what complexity is and how it affects us. Inviting us all to free-ranging inquiry across set frontiers and boundaries.

At first sight it might seem that there is no obvious connection neither between art and management in general nor between management and OUBEYs art in particular. In this context the decisive link is furnished by the theme of complexity which was of passionate interest to OUBEY and a theme which he explored throughout his lifetime, and certainly not in his art alone, ever since he first laid hands on Ilya Prigogine’s Order out of Chaos: Man’s new dialogue with nature in 1981. An intellectual inquiry into complexity, holistic systems and networking that opened up entirely new perspectives in its time.

Yet to recognize what truly connects OUBEY and his art on the one hand with the basic issues underpinning leadership and management on the other, in the context of increasing complexity, we have to take up a special vantage point, as Prof. Kruse did in his opening address.

 

However, the key competencies listed by Peter Kruse that distinguish the inquiring free-ranging mind are seldom to be encountered in the day to day exercise of leadership and management or in any of the standard reference works. They include the ability to bear complexity and tolerate instability, to accept interference, to be an attentive observer and listener and to recognize patterns – because when you possess such skills you can get very close to the system, you can familiarize yourself with its workings and gain a better overall understanding, you can learn to make use of its energies, work constructively with its inherent forces and shape them, and in so doing you can (and indeed must) leave behind some of the established instruments of management and leadership. Inquiring free-ranging minds have a passion for reflection; they are ready to mobilize the collective intelligence of an organization and leverage it to find solutions – in other words they activate latent potential by an intelligent handling of self-organization. Leadership and management as the smart interplay between hierarchy and network creativity.

 

Complexity opens up fields of play which, even though they cannot be really controlled, can be shaped in a proactive and purposeful manner when the whole cast of actors share a common understanding of situations not as computable finite “being” but as moments in a process of “becoming” in which countless numbers of interrelated factors each exert their influence and play their part. In an open process of becoming it is almost impossible to predict what will happen next. Linear thinking and mechanistic ideas of the relationship between cause and effect, objective and result are unhelpful here. The sudden intrusion of unexpected, unpredicted events may be an unwelcome disturbance – but it is precisely such disturbances that can prove beneficial in the end.

Complexity brings with it chances and possibilities for creating new forms of order that we can and should recognize and use. The human brain which can manage a system as awesomely complex as the human organism possesses an incredible ability to detect and recognize the underlying patterns in complex relationships. As Peter Kruse says, “Whenever you have the chance, tolerate complexity! Our brain has a fantastic ability to detect patterns in complexity and turn it into coherent order”. Whether such attempts will succeed or not, however, depends on one key precondition: “You can never establish new order in systems if you block out everything that disturbs, unsettles and irritates you.” If you block out what you cannot easily assimilate and continue to follow well trodden paths, the inquiring part of your brain will not be sufficiently stimulated to seek out and detect a new form of order, and unimagined possibilities will remain undiscovered.

It is interesting to note, by the way, that it is not the brain´s cerebral cortex responsible for conscious rational analysis that comes to into play here but the brain´s limbic system which is responsible for our unconscious life. Pattern recognition is an intuitive process. This is perhaps something which distinguishes many artists from most managers because: They work with and trust equally both the conscious and unconscious parts of the human brain. Do managers ever learn to work with and trust the intuitive capabilities of their brains?

Meteorology is a method which can indeed make astonishingly accurate forecasts, even accurate long-term forecasts, about something as complex as the weather situation. Yet whether there will ever be something like a “meteorology” for managers still remains to be seen. Even so, back in the 80s of the last century researchers into complexity at the Santa Fe Institute had already turned their attention to the patterns and interweaving of processes on the business and financial markets, and the results they came up with are fascinating. And the consequences that lie in wait when managers cannot make decisions that take account of all the mechanisms at work in a complex field of play have been compellingly shown by Dietrich Dörner in his masterly book The Logic of Failure, published in 1989. The principal question we need to ask today is why such knowledge and insights have not filtered down to find widespread practical application in the day to day business of management.

It might seem obvious to say that it’s much easier for an artist to find solutions for dealing with complexity and much more difficult for a manager to do the same. Yet, artists embark on the free creative process in the sense of an inquiring exploration across the boundaries of different worlds just as any other person would begin it – by the power of their own decision, consequently and continuously strengthening their personal autonomy and their ability to expand their scope.

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To read more about OUBEY, click here and here.

The author is founder and director of the international OUBEY MINDKISS Project and as such is also responsible for the Global Encounter Tour and the stopover exhibition at the Drucker Forum 2013 in Vienna.
She is founder and executive managing partner of new&able Management- und Organisationsberatung and co-founder of EnBWAkademie GmbH of which she was the CEO for 12 years.

DagmarWoyde-Koehler is a member of the New Club of Paris, the Wertekommission – Initiative for Value-oriented Leadership and Corporate Culture, and Ambassador of the European Leonardo Award Council.

What should be interesting in the work of a German artist for people in Africa? Finding an answer to this question is part of an experimental project that has now been travelling the world for some time.

With the OUBEY MINDKISS Project – which she herself initiated and runs – for the past five years Dagmar Woyde-Koehler has been creating fascinating resonance spaces for the encounter of people from a wide range of different cultures and backgrounds and the paintings of the German artist OUBEY.

Uganda is now the seventh stopover of the Global Encounter Tour. In association with the Nagandu International Academy of Art and Design (NIAAD) the stage is set for an unprecedented and very special kind of interactive – intercultural experiment on December 18, 19 and 21.

For more information please click here.

Particularly on Twitter you can track how a steady stream of new followers is joining us from countries of this Earth which we haven’t reached so far. Recent newcomers include people from Uganda, Nigeria, Chile, Israel and Palestine. We’re really delighted to see this growing worldwide resonance. Still in the lead with the most number of followers are the USA, Germany and Great Britain.

At the same time we’re also engaging with the younger platforms – with Instagram for some time now and recently Pinterest, too. Here’s what our Pinterest page looks like:

So do visit us and get in contact with us – on whichever platform you prefer. We’d love to hear your resonance on the conversation we have with you.

Social Media Links are on the bottom of the page.

Just click here and immerse yourself for a few minutes in the wonderful world of OUBEYs art, accompanied by the marvelous melodic sound of gigantic Alpine horns.

Accepting this as a matter of fact might open up the opportunity to step further in de development of our self-consciousness and to redefine the meaning of our existence. We found his remarkable statement in the internet shortly after having published this blogpost. As it fits perfectly to the message of this article, we want to place it as kind of an introduction.

Humans are wanderers and discoverers – and have always been. In the countless thousands of years of wandering through the previous stages of evolutionary history, we have formed constantly new images of ourselves, the world and the cosmos in which we live. We took the state of knowledge distilled by any epoch as the truth, and established institutions were keen to proclaim the state of knowledge reached by a particular epoch as the absolute truth – for a variety of self-interested reasons.

Whoever dared to doubt the geocentric world view of a sun revolving around the Earth – or was even audacious enough to provide scientific evidence to the contrary – would find themselves remorselessly and viciously pursued by the Church which had made this world view its own. The Enlightenment paved the way for the triumphant march of science and gradually discredited such ecclesiastical paradigms. In the course of this development a new self-image of man was born – the thinking, inquiring homo sapiens, whose critical spirit knew no bounds, saw itself as a unique kind of species and raised itself as the measure of all things: the homocentric world view was born. Science and scientific research furnished the groundwork for astonishing technical developments which again and again burnished this radiant self-image. This is a stage from which even today we have still not fully emerged.

Nothing and nobody can and could prevent us or stop us from pushing forward in our journey of discovery and research. In critical phases of transition like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment it was initially only a very small handful of individuals who had the courage to take the next step forward, to make a leap in thought and open new horizons. Yet their courage and the power of what they discovered was enough to set irreversible processes in motion that have had an effect on everybody and everything.

And now it seems as though in going down this path today, at the beginning of the 21st century, we have reached a level of awareness that represents a tipping point for us in how we consider ourselves as a species. Whether we drift away into the hubris of excessive pride and arrogance or rediscover ourselves in a new modesty and restraint could possibly be one of the questions that will determine the future course of our race’s existence.

 

Astrophysics and astronomy have laid the groundwork for a view of the world which takes the cosmos as the home of our planet and views people as the evolutionary consequence of the death of stars. Manned space flight has made us the first of all generations to carry around in our collective mind the amazingly beautiful image of a sphere freely floating in space that is our home planet Earth. Astronauts return to Earth with a consciousness markedly different from what they had when they first embarked on their outward voyage.

Nobody today can say for certain what role will be played by the new species of artificial intelligence we have created in the further for our own self-consciousness and the exploration of the Universe, perhaps in the very near future. That it will play a major role, however, is beyond doubt.

And at the same time our perception of our evolutionary beginnings has been radically transformed. Genetic research and DNA analysis have radically extended the boundaries of paleo-anthropology and shown us that we humans are in fact related to what are known as the “archaic hominids” – creatures which thus far we have looked at with purely scientific interest without feeling the slightest familial bond with them. We are not in fact the unique species we have always taken ourselves to be: the humans now walking the Earth carry in their genes the entire history of the prehistoric hominids.

So at the very moment that we are surging ahead into new and vast territories, and strange and undiscovered shores, cutting-edge scientific technology is giving us an ever clearer and more precise notion of who we are and where we come from. In the genome of each of us a trace of the Neanderthal can be found with which homo sapiens (perhaps we need a more fitting name) co-existed for more than 10,000 years in the area that makes up present-day Israel. And even traces of the over 300,000 year old hominid have now been detected. We are the product of commingling and such commingling resulted from the wanderings and spirit of discovery that lived in our far distant ancestors many thousands of years ago. Whether such a realization will sink deep in our minds, and if it does what effects it will have, is a subject best left for another day.

All these new insights and realizations have one thing in common. They all carry with them marvellous opportunities for a new form of self-determination. Our age is witnessing an exponential growth in the number and quality of such insights at truly astonishing speed. Yet, after all, by giving us the ability to walk upright on two feet, evolution has gifted us with two free hands plus a fantastic brain whose relentless curiosity has enabled us to successfully tackle and transcend frontiers. And above all it has endowed us with a consciousness fully able to ponder the elementary fundamental issues of our existence and to make decisions. We have everything we need to harmonize our energies, will power and research drive with a consciousness coloured by humility and modesty. Whether that will be enough, remains to be see. But if we don’t do this ourselves, evolution will do it for us.

How I would love to discuss these matters with OUBEY. His thoughts on the subject would certainly have been just as radical and polemic as they were fruitful. In essence they would have been the same as what I have written here. They still are ingredients of his paintings in a very special way.

 

OUBEYs connectedness to the deep roots of our evolution as humans was recognized by Professor Friedemann Schrenk, paleo-anthropologist at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, in his encounter with one of OUBEYs paintings, when he resumed that “7 million years” of human evolutionary history are contained in this picture.

For more background information on the subject, see:

• ARTE: Einer von uns (1/5)
• Carl Sagan: Wanderers

OUBEY was never in New York. So his sure-fire response to this extraordinary question had nothing to do with any personal experience that made him feel particularly connected to this building. And yet his affection for the Twin Towers was real and prompted that quick answer. He knew its underlying architectural concept, he knew its construction, its structural engineering and its technical details. And he loved the finished perfection of its aesthetics from the very first day.

In November 2005 I was in New York for the first time in my life. It was a two day trip I’d taken for the sole reason of meeting up with the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister to see if he’d be interested in designing a book about OUBEYs art. I used the short time given me to take the subway to the southernmost tip of Manhattan to see Ground Zero – four years after 9/11. I wanted and I had to see this site where the Twin Towers once reared up so proud and majestic and where now the horror of the destruction was strangely blended with the building works for the fundament of the future Memorial.

Since then I’ve been back there on every trip to New York, the last only a few weeks ago. Standing in Greenwich Street – now open for the first time since 2001 – I got an idea of what it must have been like to stand here in the time before 11 September 2001 and crane your neck up at the towers trying to get a view of their top.

One evening three years ago when zapping the TV channels, I hit on the documentary “Man on Wire”. This film shows how the young Frenchman Philippe Petit, aided and abetted by a group of friends, spent six years of intensive training for what must be surely the most crazy and breathtakingly daring high-wire act of all time – which they really did perform on 7 August 1974 on a high wire suspended between the two top points of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. Sheer madness! The whole endeavor was completely illegal and had to be prepared in secret, and it took place in the early morning of that day even though it was pretty foggy. The documentary shots show everything you need to see to quash your sense of incredulity; they’re shaky, blurred, authentic and absolutely spell-binding. With his dare-devil exploit, and inspired by the unparalleled nature of this building which he felt positively urged him on to such a spectacular action, Philippe Petit has given the Twin Towers a unique kind of memorial.

Now in a few days the film “The Walk“, which tells the story of this high-wire act will be on general release. I shall certainly be seeing it. Yet even though Robert Zemecki is an excellent director, this film will never have the emotional impact of the authentic “Man on Wire” documentary. Simply because in Zemecki’s film the Twin Towers only exist in virtual reality.

In the documentary you see them still standing and dominating the spot where today they only exist in memory. This is also a reason why this story has something to do with what OUBEY said in 1992 in response to the question if he could be a building which building would he like to be. When he gave that answer, the Twin Towers were still standing and 9/11 was just as unthinkable as Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk had once been.

And now with the newly developed Digital Discovery a whole new dimension has opened up in the OUBEY resonance space. Thus far you could either compare your own direct viewing of an original work by OUBEY with what other people on video were saying about their own experience of the same work or you could talk into the camera about your own encounter with a previously unknown painting by OUBEY. Now, however, you can also digitally delve into the deeper layers of these paintings and discover how the resonance of virtual light reveals their hidden structures and colors – by turning the Magic Bowl and following the progression of sunlight and moonlight over the surface of these paintings in a 24 hour period.

The changes wrought by the play of light on the paintings are truly dramatic and astonishing – as you can see by comparing the original “Pferdekopfnebel” (Horse Head Nebula) painting with two shots taken of its Digital Discovery.

At the Young Leonardo Awards held on14 September in Bonn the guests had time to savor this four dimensional resonance space in the OUBEY Experience Space. This project is >at the edge< , commented Leonardo Ambassador Professor Leif Edvinsson, who also goes by his nickname Mr. Brain. And he wasn’t the only one to be enthusiastic, the other guests were also thrilled, includingShyamal Majumdar, Head of UNESCO-UNEVOC and Young Leonardo award-winner Teemu Arina from Finland.

  Christoph Brosius too, who developed the original idea of Digital Discovery together with Dagmar Woyde-Koehler and whose team went on to engineer it, and who himself was one of the four winners of this year’s Young Leonardo award also had a great time in the four dimensional resonance space.

We’d like to say a big thank you to him and his team mate Jan Bubenik for setting up this marvelous installation which hopefully will reach many people in many different contexts and situations and open up a new world of art experience for them – where ever they may be across the globe.

In a forthcoming OUBEY Blog we shall present and explain the principle behind the four dimensional resonance space in the “OUBEY MINDKISS Experience Space“ in much greater detail.

 

The equal value of all forms of life on Earth which have sprung from this evolutionary process in the course of countless millions of years was for him an incontrovertible irrefutable fact. From ferns to extinct dinosaurs, from ants and dolphins, from monkeys to human beings, “everything” for OUBEY “was connected with everything” and part of a process, part of a larger whole – not to mention the bonds connecting it with the even larger cosmos. OUBEY felt intimately, organically connected with this larger whole.

His reading of Charles Darwin confirmed this view. In his studies written so long ago Darwin showed that such a belief as OUBEY held was by no means fanciful or esoteric. Darwin showed how the course of evolution could have played out. He also showed many compelling parallels between patterns of social behavior in human society and the animal and plant kingdoms. This part of his research was inimical to the zeitgeist of his time and was ignored during his lifetime and long afterwards. But only that: parts of his research were torn out of their context, willfully manipulated and contorted in the service of abstruse “theories” of Social Darwinism which in the 20th century served as justification for the most abominable crimes.

Contrary to what popular opinion holds, Darwin also gave chance a role in the history of evolution and by no means preached that inexorable kind of causality that used to be so frequently proclaimed and paraded as “Survival of the Fittest”. Very early on he had seen and recognized the dynamics and sheer complexity of the forces driving the evolutionary process. But even more than that he had also seen that the principle of parental care among animals, whose vulnerable offspring require weeks, months or even years of rearing, was comparable to the care given by human parents to their own vulnerable babies and children who also require years of protection and supervision. For him this was the very source and origin of all social behavior among us humans.

That’s important here is not whether all this can be proven down to the last detail. The point is rather that it’s becoming increasingly apparent that what posterity has made of Darwin’s legacy has little to do with what Darwin actually thought and wrote. Each epoch cherry-picks from his works just those aspects which best underpin its own view of the world and best serve its own specific interests. Popular commonplaces carry the day and become rooted in the consciousness of following generations. A winning quote is endlessly repeated, establishing its own fatal dynamic – fatal at least from the standpoint of the man who first penned it.

Far too seldom do we see a really serious fundamental probing of what someone of the stature of Darwin really investigated, discovered and wrote about. In Darwin’s case, thankfully, this lack has been recently somewhat remedied in conversation of Raphael Enthoven with Jean-Claude Ameisen, Professor of Immunology at the University of Paris Diderot, a conversation broadcast on Arte on 14 June as part of the channel’s series of Sunday Philosophy discussions. It was an intellectual restoration job of the first order that liberated Darwin by chipping away the historical ballast of skewed interpretations and partial views that have accumulated around his name.

But what about the many other quotes of Darwin that are constantly parroted without anyone taking the trouble to read the actual context and discover what the actual intent might be? Without sparing a thought for the enormous amount of research and painstaking intellectual effort that lie behind such words. The dead cannot protest at the travesties posterity makes of them.

So what should we do? We should read the original works. And if we don’t have time to read the original works, at least we should responsible enough to be wary of isolated popular quotes. We should take the time to inquire and do a little investigation before we use them to prop up the interests of our own zeitgeist. Stepping back a little from the zeitgeist can only be good for us. If I hadn’t known OUBEY, I wouldn’t be that sure it could be done – if there truly is a will. If I hadn’t taken OUBEYs paintings to New Zealand to encounter the Maori, I wouldn’t know with what enormous respect a people can treat the legacy left by its forbears. And ultimately this is what it comes down to – a question of respect for the lifework of our forebears. Darwin is only one instance.

 

It might also interest you that in the encounter between Professor Stuart Kauffman, co-founder of the legendary Santa Fe Institute Santa Fe Instituts and a leading researcher in complexity theory and one of OUBEYs paintings, an encounter that took place five years ago, a connecting line to Darwin suddenly sprang up. OUBEYs painting reminded him of a “tangled bank of Darwinian form”. Click here to see the video.

This one-of-a-kind installation gives a virtual view of the astonishing changes that occur in the colors and structures of OUBEYs multi-layered paintings when natural sunlight falls on them from different angles and in different degrees of intensity. The idea that led to the Digital Discovery had its origin in a chance encounter with the transformations wrought in a painting by the play of natural sunlight. By moving a Magic Bowl viewers can now let virtual sunlight and moonlight wander over the surface of digital 3D reproductions of various paintings and see for themselves the dramatic changes brought about in the deeper layers of the painting – quite independently of the actual light conditions in the room.

Christoph Brosius, who together with Dagmar Woyde-Koehler first hit on the idea for Digital Discovery, is the recipient of this year’s Young Leonardo Award – For Fun-Energized Learning in recognition of his innovative ingenious development of various applications, including the OUBEY Digital Discovery, that turn common everyday experience into joyful, playful discovery and learning. At the Leonardo Awards we are presenting the Digital Discovery Show as a “space within a space” concept and we’re really looking forward to seeing how it will go down with the audience.

By the way, the Digital Discovery Show can also be leased for a broad variety of events and functions. Just click here to get in touch with us. We’d be delighted to hear from you!

And now I’ve just returned from a week’s trip to Uganda where I went to do the groundwork for the next stopover of the OUBEY Global Encounter Tour.

During this week one of the questions I was continually asked was how I hit on the idea of traveling with OUBEYs art to Uganda in the first place. Two and a half months ago the thought of taking OUBEY to Uganda would never even have crossed my mind, so this question was pretty intriguing to me as well.

The story that goes with it is a case in point that shows what can happen when you put your faith in the magnetic powers of existing energies to give what is potentially possible the chance to become reality. And not the least of the reasons why I’m giving this story in the abbreviated version below is that I hope it will encourage others to rely more on the potential inherent in happenstance and less on the supposed power and strength of planning.

Two months ago in a break during the Freedom Forum in Oslo a man who had known me and the OUBEY MINDKISS Project for the past year, was talking to another person at the conference about the MINDKISS Project – a man called Eirik Jarl Trondsen. When I returned to the auditorium after the break it so happened that this Eirik was sitting directly behind me in the next row. We exchanged a few words, I gave him my card and a small leaflet about the project. That was last we saw of one another at the conference.

But a few days later I received an invitation from him to come to Uganda. He had studied the website of the OUBEY MINDKISS Project very attentively and found that a visit from the Global Encounter Tour would be a sound and beneficial proposition. Eirik has lived in Uganda and Kenya for twenty years, and for many years now in the two countries has been running the Affirmative ArtProject which he himself initiated and which aims to help young people in Uganda and Kenya find a way out of the general hopelessness of their situation by developing their own personal perspectives through the self-discovery and self expression of art. As the MINDKISS project tends to seek interdisciplinarity more than closeness to other forms of art, at first I was rather skeptical. But when I saw the Affirmative Art Project’s website, my skepticism immediately turned into curiosity and empathy.

So I took up his invitation. All the time that remained for our preparatory meeting was a short time window in the last week of July. It was one of those decisive moments, a “now or never” moment as I called it. So I managed to tease out that last July week from my crowded calendar, booked the flight and the hotel, and at midday on 26 July found myself in Entebbe, Uganda’s former capital. Not knowing whom I was going to meet there and uncertain of what lies ahead of me. In Africa for the very first time in my life. Kind of an adventure.

My (self) confidence was richly rewarded. Eirik was and still is not only personally thrilled by the idea of this collaborative venture. Prior to my arrival he had also aroused the interest of the NIAADand the Makerere College, two potential local partners. In the intensive meetings and talks between him, Dr. Kizito Maria, Dr. Bruno Sserunkuuma and myself, it became apparent that what we were dealing with here was a very special instance of serendipity at work.

On the one hand there was the enthusiasm of our partners for OUBEYs art, their deep understanding of its meaning, their whole-hearted agreement with the basic ideas underpinning the OUBEY MINDKISS Project, and, beyond all this, even the first ideas for the creation of completely new resonance spaces of a kind never before seen in the OUBEY Project. And, on the other hand, there was my own enthusiasm for the fantastic unflagging efforts of these exceptional men who for so many years have labored tirelessly to provide an alternative to the hopelessness and despair prevalent among young people in their home country where the majority of the population is under 30.

In that one week I experienced so much that would bear the telling but which reasons of space prohibit. Time and time again I was told what a tremendous honor it was that I should be bringing OUBEYs art to Uganda this coming December. To which I can only respond that for my part I consider all the resonance I have received thus far and the invitation that came out of it as a tremendous honor for myself and also for OUBEY and his art. Right now I can hardly imagine anything more wonderful and more exciting for our project than this forthcoming stopover of the Global Encounter Tour.

Given the infrastructure of the place, organizing logistics will be no easy matter. But we are going to master all the challenges. And we are going to see an openness, a directness and a joyfulness in the way people experience OUBEYs art of a type that we have never encountered before. After that week during which I saw and experienced so much, of this I am quite certain. So this is a story I really do love.

Last week‘s first exploratory visit showed that our partners at the NIAAD, Makarere College and the local Affirmative Art project are not only tremendously enthusiastic about collaborating with us but also have a deep understanding of the multilayered nature of OUBEYs art, of OUBEYs attitude to life and work and of the basic ideas underpinning the OUBEY MINDKISS Project. And of course their work is as interesting for us as ours is for them.

Find out more about the pillars of the Affirmative Art project in this PREZI. For more pics of this journey to Uganda please visit us on Facebook, Google+ or @oubeymindkiss on Instagram.

The success of a “subproject” like this next stopover of the Global Tour in Uganda with all the conceptual – and in this case logistical! – challenges it involves, is absolutely reliant on the good will and personal dedication of people on the ground who have the deep commitment and the skills needed to bring it to fruition. These are the very people we have found.

We are looking forward eagerly to working together in this Fantastic Four team and will do our level best to unleash the full potential of this next stopover of the Global Encounter Tour and make it what it can be: a truly unique, enriching intercultural adventure for all of us – with an open outcome.