Sustainability: Culture and foundations can make a big difference!

Association for Non-Profit Foundations showed best practice for art, culture and philanthropy in the spirit of a sustainable society as part of the Austrian Ecolabel.

Vienna (OTS) – The “Austrian Environmental Label”, introduced in 1990, highlights companies every year that are particularly environmentally friendly and sustainable in their work methods and production. On the occasion of today’s certificate award ceremony in the Leopold Museum with Federal Minister Leonore Gewessler, the Association for Non-Profit Foundations, together with the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology, also invited people to a future workshop. The focus was on the question of what contribution art and culture can make to a transformation towards a sustainable society and how philanthropists can support this. Federal Minister Leonore Gewessler, Marisa Schiestl-Swarovski (Swarovski Foundation), the artist Judith Fegerl and Günther Lutschinger (Association for Non-Profit Foundations) discussed this. This format is part of a series of future workshops run by the Association for Non-Profit Foundations with the aim of creating more awareness of environmental and climate protection, sustainability and the circular economy. „The important aim of our initiative is to motivate more philanthropists and charitable foundations in Austria to get involved in these important future areas in order to work together to shape a sustainable and livable future for all people“emphasizes Günther Lutschinger, Managing Director of the Association for Non-Profit Foundations.

Sustainable perspective through art

As an example of promoting sustainability awareness through art, a video report about the artist Judith Fegerl, who created a unique solar sculpture entitled “converter”, exhibited in the Vienna MuseumsQuartier, was presented as part of the “Austrian Ecolabel”. Her work of art is a hybrid structure made of steel, photovoltaic panels, light bodies and electronic components that feeds on sunlight and has references to both technical objects and the animal and plant world. The artist thus enables a different perspective on functional technology beyond the traditional areas of application. Your sculpture uses photovoltaic panels to feed energy into the power grid during the day and provides visitors with shade, while the installation consumes the solar energy again at night, creating a radiant lighting effect.
„I want the art or the work I make to have a self-sustaining aspect, that it gives back more than it consumes itself“says Judith Fegerl. As an artist, she also sees herself as having a responsibility here. A sentence from the film “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” by Luc Besson and Virginie Besson-Silla is written on the base of the solar sculpture: “habaï ne sï natena, se paï tanïmena” – “Let us give back to nature, what she gave us.”