Much less of a manifest, much more than a manifest

It feels a little like solving a puzzle. At each table, a different person is waiting for you, bringing with them a particular strand of research, a practice, a tool. At first, these encounters appear to be separate fragments, even though you know they are all, in one way or another, concerned with sustainability (in the arts). As you move from one conversation to the next, however, the pieces begin to fall into place. Each person seems to be revealing another part of the same, much larger picture. The stories are closely intertwined in manifest less: the people you meet are professionally connected, collaborate on shared projects, retu7rn to similar questions, and approach overlapping concerns from different perspectives. Gradually, an entire network begins to emerge.

I started with Ajda Pistotnik from Policy Lab, at 10AM on Monday. Ajda’s work, like that of many others who take part in these one-on-one encounters and “dates” with experts in the field, seeks to shift the emphasis away from growth for growth’s sake and towards quality of life. For decades, the dominant measure of how well a country is doing has been GDP (Gross Domestic Product), which tells us how much economic activity is taking place but very little about how that activity translates into people’s well-being or the health of the environment. Well-being, in this understanding, does not depend on endless expansion or accumulation. It asks us to pay attention to interconnectedness, to the relationships between things and the delicate balance required to sustain them.

Our daily kuglof

Ajda opened with the work of Kate Raworth and her concept (or, perhaps more accurately, her visual framework for sustainability) of doughnut economics which offers an alternative way of thinking about and measuring a society’s success beyond conventional indicators such as GDP. The “doughnut” represents the safe space between two boundaries. The inner ring is a social foundation, based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, below which no one should fall: everyone should have access to essentials such as food, housing, healthcare, education, and political voice. The outer ring is an ecological ceiling, defined by nine planetary boundaries (including, for instance, climate change, biodiversity loss, land conversion and air pollution) that human activity should not exceed if we are to avoid putting too much pressure on the Earth’s systems. Through it, Raworth offers an alternative to mainstream economic thinking and, more specifically, to the idea of endless growth as the primary measure of progress. Doughnut Economics proposes: an economy should be judged by its ability to meet people’s needs while remaining within the ecological limits of the planet. Success, then, should be defined by whether people are able to thrive within a socially just and ecologically safe space. The question shifts towards how well can we live, and how satisfied can we be with our lives, within the means of the planet?

If you want to see how different countries fare against these social and ecological thresholds, you can explore the data here: https://doughnuteconomics.org/tools/doughnut-by-country-level. Spoiler alert: nobody is doing particularly well even though some countries come close on certain measures.

As Ajda pointed out, the image of a doughnut which translates as krof in Slovenian and krafna in Croatian, does not quite fit within the food imagery of our countries, since neither has a hole in the middle. There is also another metaphor for the model: that of a life ring, which offers a more honest image. We are living through overlapping ecological and social emergencies, and we need an urgent response to our drowning. Yet this is also the limitation of the metaphor. People do not necessarily want to be continually reminded that they are living through an emergency. A life ring evokes danger, crisis and a situation from which we need to escape; the doughnut suggests abundance, pleasure and a space we might actually want to inhabit. This is the communicative strength of the doughnut, as it translates the response to it into an image of a desirable destination.

Perhaps kuglof offers a more familiar alternative for this part of Europe. It has the necessary hole in the middle while retaining the abundance and pleasure of the original doughnut. There is also something fitting in its complicated cultural history: kuglof travelled through the culinary landscape of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and became part of several regional traditions. As a local translation of the doughnut, then, it would carry both the shape of Raworth’s model and traces of our own entangled histories of empire, migration, appropriation and exchange.

Selling ourselves an image of a liveable future

At the same time, there is something frustrating about this constant need to make things palatable. Why must even the question of planetary survival be made appealing, familiar and desirable before we are willing to engage with it? There is a strange tension in having to sell ourselves an image of a liveable future, as though the possibility of continued life were not compelling enough on its own. Perhaps this is another thing the doughnut and the kuglof reveals: the difficulty of communicating ecological limits and our expectation that even those limits must be packaged as something we might want to consume.

But questions of how sustainability is communicated quickly become questions of where, by whom and through which practices it is made meaningful. I had encountered the image of the doughnut before, through the work of the Institute for Political Ecology (IPE) in Croatia, a research and educational organisation. In many ways, IPE feels like a Croatian counterpart to Slovenian Policy Lab. Which points to something obvious, but still worth mentioning - sustainability cannot really be approached as an isolated subject. Everything keeps leading somewhere else. And, somehow, back to everything else. Sustainability is fundamentally about relationships: between people, practices, institutions, resources and environments, and about recognising the ways in which each depends upon and affects the others.

In fact, this very format, a constellation of tables staging one-on-one “dates” with different experts, was itself recycled from an earlier project: The Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge, curated by Hannah Hurtzig as a part of her Mobile Academy Berlin. First organized in 2005 as an installation bringing together more than a hundred experts, the project has since gone through numerous iterations in various countries around the world (and a slight name change, becoming The Market for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge). There is still an online archive of the talks here: https://audio-archive.com/int#/.

But the genealogy of this project can be traced backwards in several directions: towards Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics and his understanding of the artwork as a “social interstice”, a space organised around encounters, exchanges and temporary forms of sociability, or towards the use of “experts of the everyday” as performers in Rimini Protokoll’s work. Hurtzig’s format may itself echo Thomas Lehmen’s STATIONEN (2003), a choreographic project for which Lehmen placed an ad inviting people to talk about what they did for a living as part of a public performance, in exchange for a fee. What emerges is a seductive chain of appropriations and affinities: formats and ideas travelling between artistic contexts, being borrowed, re-staged, renamed, and made to perform differently.

(A small digression, too good to leave out: in the Zagreb iteration of STATIONEN in April 2004, one of the people who answered the ad worked as a secretary to a man who spent his time replying to Nigerian scam emails, genuinely believing that the promised money would eventually materialize. Her job even involved accompanying him on trips to Africa in pursuit of it.)

Excell sheet of excruciating ecological guilt

Following this chain of encounters, and returning to the tables in Ljubljana, at the second table, I met Vita Rau from Motovila, an NGO that supports people and organisations working in arts and culture by helping them collaborate, access funding, develop their work and build international connections. Vita presented a free online carbon-footprint calculator for cultural organisations, projects and events, developed through a collaboration between Motovila and Umanotera. Based on self-assessment, the calculator invites organisations to look closely at the environmental impact of their own activities, from energy use and travel to materials, waste, water, food and accommodation. This calculator helps reveal where the largest impacts lie and where meaningful reductions might be possible. Vita guided me through the tool, showing how this kind of self-assessment can become a practical starting point for introducing more sustainable practices into cultural work. I tried to apply it to the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, where I work, but quickly realised that I didn’t have the data needed to carry out such a self-assessment. Then I discovered that Umanotera also offers a personal carbon-footprint calculator, which brings the question down to the scale of individual everyday choices. The point, of course, is not to calculate one’s organisation’s or one’s own footprint and then become bedridden with excruciating ecological guilt. The idea is rather to use the result as a starting point: to identify where change is possible, make some changes, and return six months later to see whether they have made a difference. In that sense, measurement feels less like a judgement, and more a tool for changing behaviour.

The third table was by far the most crowded. There were people from Theater Oberhausen and Volkstheater Vienna, and there were a lot of them. It turned out that these two theatres are part of GreenStage, an EU co-funded project bringing together theatres, cultural organisations, researchers and municipalities across five European countries to explore how sustainability might be introduced throughout the entire ecology of a performing arts institution. 

Greenstage network and where did Marian Blessing go?

Central to the project is an attempt to move theatre and other performing arts and cultural institutions towards a model in which materials, knowledge and resources remain in circulation. It draws on the idea of the circular economy: many of the resources contemporary economies depend on are finite, while global demand for raw materials continues to grow. Their extraction and processing also carry considerable environmental costs, from greenhouse-gas emissions to habitat destruction and biodiversity loss. Circularity means intervening throughout a product’s life: designing things to last, and to be repaired, dismantled, reused and eventually recycled, so that fewer new resources are needed and less waste is produced. 

There is also a geopolitical dimension. European policy tends to frame circularity partly as a way of reducing Europe’s dependence on imported raw materials and its vulnerability to shortages and price fluctuations. This is a rather Europe-centred way of putting it: the more fundamental question is how to reduce the relentless demand for extraction itself, particularly when its environmental and social costs are so often displaced elsewhere, far from the societies consuming the resulting materials and products. The circular economy, then, involves rethinking the entire life of a product, from the resources and energy that go into making it to what happens once its first use has come to an end. GreenStage project approaches the question of sustainability from several directions at once: through a sustainability self-assessment tool for cultural institutions (SAPA), a Zero-Waste Stage Toolbox, experimental Zero-Waste Stage Labs, and policy work intended to translate what is learned within individual institutions into a more systemic change.

The zero-waste Theater Oberhausen production Marian Blessing Makes Her Escape is based on a text by Finnish author E. L. Karhu about a woman who wants to be left in peace rather than placed in a retirement home, so naturally, things escalate into murder, followed by confinement in a psychiatric ward and a daring escape. Dolly Parton is also somehow involved. With her loyal friends by her side, Marian eventually rides off toward Blessingland, a wonderfully unruly utopia.

As the production’s dramaturg Laura Mangels emphasises, the project which premieres on 8 October, isn’t minimalist at all. While the label “zero-waste” might conjure up an image of a stripped-back stage, with fewer sets, costumes, props, and materials, with Marian the principle is quite different: it’s about reuse, not reduction. And that somehow feels perfectly in tune with the exuberance of the story itself. There is also a connection between the main production principle and a story about a woman who is expected to quietly disappear into a retirement home, but instead insists on taking up space, causing trouble, and starting an entirely new life. The production seems to extend that same generosity to its materials: it asks what already exists and what else it might become, rather than reducing what is on stage. What Theater Oberhausen is developing sounds almost like an enormous theatrical recycling mechanism: sets, costumes, props, and materials are conceived as things with previous and future lives. They might be reused from earlier productions, borrowed or exchanged between theatres, sourced second-hand, adapted, dismantled, and ultimately released back into circulation.

Degrowth is not recession

After this table, I joined Viktorija Illoska for a conversation inspired by Serge Latouche’s A Farewell to Growth (2007), a landmark text of the degrowth movement. Published on the eve of the 2007/08 financial crisis, the book questioned what had become almost a secular heresy: the idea that perpetual economic growth is neither possible nor desirable. The crisis exposed the fragility of debt-fuelled growth, yet rather than questioning the model itself, governments focused on restoring it, even socialising financial losses through public bailouts. Latouche’s deeper argument is that growth has colonised our imagination: we struggle to conceive of prosperity without producing, consuming and working more. Degrowth is not recession, however.  Latouche’s point is that shrinking a growth-dependent economy produces unemployment and social breakdown. Degrowth means deliberately redesigning society so that it doesn’t require growth to function. This means challenging an economic system that depends on continually expanding consumption, treats technological innovation as an escape from ecological limits, and concentrates economic power. But consuming less does not necessarily mean giving up nice things and novelty. As a teenager, I had a friend with whom I exchanged clothes. Every six months or so, we would swap again: I would take what I liked from her wardrobe and she from mine. We effectively got new clothes without buying or producing anything new. This required either taking good care of each other’s things or, in our case, since we were both far too lazy for that, simply not being too bothered by the tears and signs of wear they accumulated along the way. We were not practising minimalism, our wardrobes kept changing and we continued to enjoy clothes. But newness came through circulation rather than acquisition. In retrospect, there is something of the Marian Blessing Makes Her Escape logic in this: reuse did not mean having less, but allowing what already existed to circulate, change hands and acquire another life. However, I don’t want to romanticise the swap as an easy model that can easily be reproduced in adult life. Clothes now carry more demands for me: fit, personal style, and perhaps a greater expectation that what I wear should somehow be distinctly mine. Giving something away for six months is no longer quite as casual as passing on a T-shirt I might otherwise have replaced. The hard question is how to create forms of abundance, pleasure and novelty that are less dependent on constant acquisition. Part of the difficulty is that these things are highly individual: what I want to keep for years, exchange, repair or wear until it falls apart may be entirely different from what works for someone else. Yet for any of these practices to become more than individual choices, they need systems that make them possible: networks of exchange, repair and reuse, but also ways of producing things that allow them to circulate, change and last. 

But my conversation with Viktorija was less about consumption than about overproduction in the arts. She asked me about the independent dance scene in Croatia: why is everyone working so much? In the arts, growth can mean producing another performance, starting another project, applying for another grant, travelling to another festival, organising another programme, writing another proposal. The pressure is to keep making work in order to remain visible, funded and professionally active. This makes degrowth in the arts a more complicated proposition. What would it actually mean to produce less when individual artists and organisations operate within systems that often require continuous production in order to survive? Choosing to slow down individually does little if funding structures, institutions and professional expectations continue to reward output. As with reuse, repair or longevity, an individual practice can only go so far without a system capable of supporting it. Working less seems to be very, very difficult and an actual existential threat.

And yet producing less might mean keeping things in circulation for longer: turning a performance into a lecture and then back into a performance; returning to the same research, materials or ideas and letting them mutate from one context to another. This would also mean questioning the modernist imperative of newness that still structures so much artistic production: the expectation that artistic development must take the form of the next new work, the next premiere, the next project. We might ask what else can this thing I have already made become? A work could have a longer life, accumulate contexts and audiences, wear out, be repaired, transformed and returned to. Paradoxically but also obviously, none of this is new. Perhaps we need to inhabit the ideas we already have more fully: to stay with them for longer, test them, repeat them, experience them more intensely, and allow them to change how we actually work. An idea can remain endlessly interesting without ever becoming consequential. Turning it into practice might take some time and patience.

Some more tools

Another table brought me back to something that had already come up in the discussion on good practices with the people from Oberhausen and Vienna. This time, I found myself at the table of one of their collaborators, the Wuppertal Institute. The conversation again revolved around the GreenStage project, but shifted towards the tools being developed within it, including SAPA, a self-assessment tool for cultural institutions. I later went to see the video presentation / explanatory video of SAPA on the GreenStage website, and felt my will to live being slowly drained from me by a sustainability performance indicator.

How do you make sustainability part of everyday cultural practice without turning it into another chore, another form to fill in, another set of indicators to monitor? There is something of a diet mentality in this approach: count the calories, macros, proteins and fibre; calculate what you are allowed to consume; record your progress; try to be good. Sustainability risks becoming a regime of permanent self-monitoring, administered through spreadsheets and specialist language. For a sector already exhausted by applications, reporting and the demand to keep producing, adding another layer of measurement can feel strangely at odds with the idea of degrowth itself. Institutions should definitely understand their environmental impact: but how to make that knowledge enable different ways of working rather than create more (boring) work.

The frustration is sharpened by a question of scale. Cultural institutions certainly have an environmental footprint, and there are obvious reasons to reduce it, but they are hardly the principal drivers of the ecological crisis, as it was mentioned many times. There is something disproportionate about asking an already administratively burdened cultural sector to account for every journey, material and kilowatt while vastly more resource-intensive systems of production and consumption continue to operate at another scale entirely. For a sector already exhausted by applications, reporting and the demand to keep producing, sustainability can easily become yet another reporting requirement rather than an opportunity to work differently. Avoiding the translation of ecological responsibility to an elaborate exercise in institutional calorie-counting would be good.

Joyful tableware

But not every sustainability measure is quite so soul-destroying. To make their Festival Kitchen more sustainable, Bunker asked people to donate cutlery, plates and soup bowls that they don’t use. It is a very simple intervention, but also one that changes the experience for the better. Eating from a real plate with real cutlery is simply nicer than eating from disposable paper or plastic. Nothing is being sacrificed here, if anything, pleasure is added. The objects already exist, they are brought back into circulation, and their reuse produces a more convivial experience. I find easier to warm up to this kind of sustainability: a practice that can actually make things more pleasurable.

Perhaps I am also being unfair to the sustainability equivalent of counting macros. At certain points in our lives, we need to pay close attention to our health, while for some people, for instance, those living with chronic illness or disability, such attention is an unavoidable part of everyday life. What initially feels tedious may, over time, become routine. The same may be true of environmental accounting. Once it becomes part of ordinary practice, the counting may recede into the background. So perhaps counting might eventually change habits enough that we no longer experience sustainability primarily as restriction. Also, it feels incredibly privileged to say that we simply don't feel like doing it because it might be boring.

Maybe the most painful moment came at the Umanotera table, when I was confronted again with the necessity for most of us to eat less meat and dairy. For me, that is such an emotional issue. At the same time, I completely understand the frustration around our current obsession with protein intake (esp. for women over 40), which so often translates into consuming more animal protein. But things got a little better when Jonas Sonnenschein tried to cheer me up by mentioning a study by environmental scientist Kimberly Nicholas (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children), which found that having one fewer child has a far greater impact on reducing an individual’s carbon footprint than switching to an electric car or adopting a plant-based diet. The study, unsurprisingly, provoked an enormous amount of outrage and backlash drawing criticism from traditionalists, pronatalist commentators, and political figures who argued it promoted anti-family or dystopian views. But since I have exactly zero children, perhaps I’ve earned the occasional carpaccio?

On that note, I had a great discussion with Gaja Brecelj, also from Umanotera, who struck me as such a reasonable person, in the best possible way, as did so many of the people involved in these conversations. She talked about simple things, like the ratio of different foods on our plates, and was very non-judgmental and realistic about the kinds of changes that need to happen. She also helped put certain things into perspective. One thing that stayed with me was that, when it comes to the carbon footprint of our diet, what we eat generally matters much more than how far our food has travelled. Meat and dairy, especially beef, tend to have a much larger carbon footprint than plant-based foods, and transportation usually accounts for only a relatively small share of a food’s overall emissions. So, somewhat counterintuitively, locally produced beef can have a considerably larger carbon footprint than vegetables that have travelled thousands of kilometres. The important exception is food that has actually been flown in, since air freight is extremely carbon-intensive.

At one of the remaining tables, I met with people from Mantova: representatives of Teatro Magro and the Municipality of Mantova. Together with three other local theatre companies, Teatro Magro is part of 4D Teatro / Off Scene Mantova, a collaborative contemporary-theatre network that also participates in the Greenstage project. The four companies have joined forces to create a richer cultural programme of performances, workshops, artistic residencies and new productions, with a strong participatory approach that invites audiences to engage more deeply with themselves and their communities. Environmental sustainability has also become part of this work, in terms of how theatre is produced, but also in terms of what theatre can communicate about our relationship with the natural world.

While looking through Teatro Magro’s website, I came across another project that caught my attention: Soil Stories: A Science-Art Alliance for Living Soil Literacy. It seems to take the connection between art and environmental awareness in a very tangible direction: the project explores the living world beneath our feet. The exchange goes both ways between scientists and artists: science offers artists new ways of understanding soil and its biodiversity, while art brings storytelling, sensory experience, and emotional connection into the conversation. Out of these encounters come site-specific performances that reveal the “hidden life” of soil, installations that make its biodiversity experiential, and workshops in which local communities become soil storytellers themselves.

Even more tools, but not quite so quantitative

And finally, I ended up at Alexandra Papademetriou’s table/exhibition, The Degrowth Toolbox for Artistic Practices. In essence, she articulates a degrowth approach to the arts that asks us to organise our practices around well-being, conviviality, autonomy, sustainability, inclusion and care, while challenging capitalist, authoritarian, patriarchal and colonial structures. This led to a rather amusing conversation around the table about deadlines or more specifically, about missing them, and whether taking care of oneself might sometimes mean allowing a deadline to slip. I felt obliged to mention that I was once thirteen years late with a book. And since I am also about three weeks late with this text, I think it is safe to say that I have mastered degrowth in the arts. 

The Toolbox questions the art world's obsession with efficiency, competition and “hustle culture”: producing more work, applying for more grants, building the CV, staying visible and, yes, meeting deadlines. In their place, it proposes strategies such as slowness, even laziness, making normally invisible care work visible, sharing resources and knowledge, creating independent spaces, self-organising, redistributing institutional resources, and working collectively rather than competitively. 

And right there, in the middle of the room, was Suzana Krevh’s My Day of Rest and Relaxation, an artwork we could quite literally lie down in and join her in doing very little. As we talked about slowness, care and the right not to be permanently productive, there was a bed in front of us inviting us to practise what we were discussing. Also, back at the Old Power Station, Karolína Kotrbová’s Spontaneous Pause Area created a “space within a space” where you could stop, sit or lie down, spend some time without being expected to do anything in particular.

One of more important points of Papademetriou’s Toolbox, however, is that it doesn't pretend artists can simply step outside the systems they criticise, as we already mentioned in my conversation with Viktorija. Artists still need grants, institutions, commissions and paid work. The Toolbox therefore argues for “staying with the trouble”: acknowledging those contradictions while continuing to experiment with fairer and more sustainable ways of making and supporting art.

On foot, by bike, by train

And this brings me to the framework around all of this: the Mladi Levi Festival, which is itself one of the GreenStage practices, the Zero-Waste Stage Lab, as an attempt at creating a sustainable theatre festival, in paralel with Oberhausen and Riga’s zero-waste stage productions. This is obviously something Bunker has been thinking about for years. I can’t remember when I was first asked how I had come to the festival: on foot, by bike, by car, or by some other means of transport - was it 15 years ago? Whenever it was, I have to admit that at the time I didn’t quite understand why anyone wanted to know. Looking back now, it is clear that sustainability was not something Bunker suddenly discovered when it became an unavoidable topic in the cultural sector; in one form or another, it has been part of the organisation’s thinking and practice for a long time, and in all sorts of ways. 

This includes my favourite kind of sustainability: social and organisational sustainability. It may seem less obviously related to sustainability than recycling materials or calculating the carbon footprint of a touring production, but it asks whether it’s possible for people who make all of this to actually continue doing it? It means thinking about working conditions, relationships, time, care, knowledge, fair distribution of resources, the ability of an organisation and the people within it to endure without permanently exhausting themselves, as there is not much point in creating an environmentally sustainable festival if everyone involved burns out while producing it. 

Attempts on our lives

And yet there are all sorts of things that complicate this: generational differences, for instance, and not only different ideas but different feeling regimes around work, commitment, responsibility, authority, boundaries and care. What one generation understands as dedication, another might experience as an unhealthy working culture. What some people see as flexibility, others might experience as instability. Even the language of care can mean very different things to different people. Social sustainability cannot mean eliminating tension or making everyone comfortable. It is also about creating organisations capable of living with these differences and talking about them openly, and it seems to me that Bunker has always been really good at doing that.

And this is reflected in the choice of performances. Most importantly, they do not forcibly represent sustainability. In Beton Ltd.’s Phenomenal Reality, part 1, for instance, much of the stage set consists of elements of theatre infrastructure that are normally supposed to remain invisible: cables, reflectors, lights and other technical equipment: the machinery itself becomes part of what we see. Social sustainability enters the work as well, through tense power relations between generations, between differently positioned authors and performers, and between people who do not necessarily have the same degree of agency or visibility. Sustainability thus becomes embedded in the language of the performance: in whose voice is heard and whose labour is acknowledged, in how you treat the people you work with. Andreja Kargačin’s Dora or Who’s Going to Stitch the Vests?, although at the end almost unbearably overwrought and sentimental, is an important production because it engages so directly with the political reality of contemporary Serbia: the student-led protest movement, state repression and exile approached through the friendship and correspondence between two young women, one of whom can no longer safely return home. Social sustainability seems to acquire an urgent meaning: it becomes a question of being able to participate in public life, to disagree and protest, but it also becomes about maintaining relationships and solidarity between people physically separated by exile and across the borders of the countries of the region. 

These questions are also present in the very different, dry and physical Clap and Slap by Agnietė Lisičkinaitė and Igor Šugalejev, which brings questions of responsibility towards the state, against the background of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, and of artists’ complicated relationship to the nationality assigned to them directly onto the body: into blows and slaps, reddened skin, pain and endurance. 

Dad for Dinner also feels intensely physical, mostly because of the commanding presence of Gaya de Medeiros, combined with a half-surprised, half-terrified, half-actually-enjoying-himself audience participant (do I have a half left?) who finds himself caught in the family tension between a daughter and her transphobic father or even masculinity itself.

There are, admittedly, environmental factors in Silvia Calderoni and Ilenia Caleo’s Temporale  {A Lesbian Tragedy}: storms, fog, smoke drift through this colourful performance which is doing something to the idea of time. But not everything needs to be dragged into my sustainability argument. Instead, it felt to me like a funnier, less pompous, cartoonish in a good way and… well, more lesbian version of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. 

Bunker has always taken care of its neighbourhood and the different generations that make it up, and I will finish this text by remembering Evergreens under the Trees: an open-air afternoon of dancing in Tabor Park to evergreens selected together by the Mladi Levi team and residents of the Ljubljana Centre Retirement Home. It was an event for festival-goers who appreciate a more relaxed pace and an early bedtime. My kind of people.