Creativity for free

While “Recycling” in Germany generally brings to mind the green spot and the recycling paper bin in front of your house, people from some southern countries have developed creative ideas about how to re-use these materials: they are producing useful, and sometimes unusual, things for day to day use. Above all, children are creating toys out of “civilisation’s rubbish”. In West Africa, for example, new jobs have been created during the last decades by the need for people to specialise in reworking plastic, rubber and metal rubbish. Delivered to them by the rubbish collectors: they produce ladles and buckets out of cooking oil canisters, cookers from car parts etc., etc. Particularly in the cities, these cheap, recycled, products are often replacing “traditional” household objects.

The exhibition “Creativity costs nothing” is mainly aimed at school children. Stimulated by the pieces in the exhibition, children and young people will have the opportunity to turn their own hand at creatively producing toys, jewelry, or useful objects out of “rubbish”. This not only makes demands on the individual’s fantasy, it also helps to make them more conscious about materials that are normally just “thrown away”.