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Statement for and on behalf of FIUWAC, from Waldo Bien, Founding-Director.
A central tenet of the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research, founded in 1972 by Joseph Beuys, as part of his enlarged conception of artistic action, and Heinrich Böll, the Nobel Prize laureate, is perfectly captured in Beuys's remarks: " Economics is not only a money making principle. It can be a way of production to fulfill the demands of people all over the world. Capital is human kind's ability in work, not just money. Thus economics includes the creativity of people. Creativity equals Capital". One of the most pressing issues for the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research was how to help realize the capacity of each person to be a creative being; how to formulate the concept of individual freedom as the ability to shape social forms, through the transformation of resources.
Joseph Beuys developed the concept "social sculpture" to describe the interplay between spiritual, material and social spheres, where, thanks to the principles of freedom and equality, economics would create bonds of community, cooperation, creative flows of energy. For Beuys constant change and permanent dialogue was the source and process for social sculpture. His belief was that such a work of transformation had the power to release the binding patterns of history and the potential to bring forward in society the energies that emerge in creativity, in any realm in which it manifests itself.
Such a social sculpture requires a free flow of information, democratic initiatives, production-sites that could overcome barriers between structures, between knowledge and instinct, to become a genuine practice of interdisciplinary research where the organic and the technological, intuition and intellect would melt and reconfigure into new social wholes in which creativity can flourish.
Art is everyone's capacity, thus, Beuys's dictum: "Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler". The activity of F.I.U. has helped to create fusions and crossing points, survival bridges between people and economy. It is a permanent platform and conference with individual freedom as the primary creative datum.
The F.I.U.Amsterdam has proposed with the co-operation of the environmental and socially concerned TRIODOS BANK, "where more than money counts", to create a "modern collection", which reflects new needs in the imagination for the future, and thinking for all resources, natural, human, ecological and social.
The Free International University World Art Collection (FIUWAC) on my initiative and with the TRIODOS BANK has as its aim an open and transparent collection, which belongs to everyone and will be available, world- wide, to any group willing and capable to host and support it.
By accepting this proposal as value, TRIODOS has enabled FIUWAC to form and acquire, by gift, loan, donation, acquisition and purchase, the kernel of a pluralistic and multicultural collection, which uses the archive of its own formation, the so called F.I.U.tures, as a guarantee that in 25 years its sale will redeem the money in the first instance as a loan against its formation. Creativity has its own economic mutuality in the trust of this cooperation between FIUWAC and TRIODOS. As part of the permanent conference lectures, publications, the building of active websites will continue to promote the presence of these creative agencies within the collection.
Active members of the F.I.U.Amsterdam, Jacobus Kloppenburg, Babeth Mondini vanLoo, Hilarius Hofstede, Alfons Alt, Patrick Healy, Brendan O'Byrne and friends and supporters as Walter Hopps, Virgil and Deborah Grotfeldt, inter al, have made donations and contributions. In conjunction with the magnificent and generous loan to the FIUWAC from the Rudolf Steiner archive in Dornach, Dr. Walter Kugler, has drawn our attention to comments, which Steiner made when speaking out on August 11, 1919, that we need new heads on our shoulders when we wish to ensure a wise future for mankind. The abstraction of value in money must be returned to the flows and needs of a properly human and spiritually alive existence, where human, animal and plant potencies are reanimated as care and responsibility.
The formation of FIUWAC manifests concretely the search for the realization of spiritual and creative goals for society, which can create a vital enchantment for the world.
Waldo Bien Founding Director, FIUWAC sept.1 1999
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FIUWAC Manifest. Published by the F.I.U. Amsterdam and the Triodos Bank October the 1st 1999.
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