Jul 22, 2026 · 49 min · 11 segments
Manifesta is an itinerant European Biennale and art-as-catalyst-for-development event that launched in 1996. In its 30th year, it arrived in the Ruhr Valley. Its founding director Hedwig Fijen and its…
Hedwig FijenGuestTim AbrahamsHost
Josep BohigasGuestO times, in which the meager, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute took at once the attraction of a continent in romance.
Europe in the early 1990s was, as you will hear from Hedwig Fijen, the founder of the former Biennale and now what an itinerant arts-led bureaucracy Manifesta describes the irrealist, surrealist optimism of Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, the Eastern Bloc collapsed, and restrictive communist regimes gave way to, well, what? In the 1990s, Manifesta was born of that moment when it was still not clear what would become of new governments and nations in the East.
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