2009'S TOP 10: 3

Inter Faith Week exhibition,

Highcross, Sunday 15 – Saturday 22 November 2009

Anyone who saw the exhibition, or took part in it, may be surprised to see that it's not at number one in my top ten countdown for 2009. But in this list I've tried to balance things that affected me deeply, or things that I feel I did well, alongside things that brought benefit to, or spread the good name of, Leicester Council of Faiths. No doubt this exhibition for Inter Faith Week met all these criteria. It was by far the biggest single project that I was involved in since taking up my post and it was surely the biggest single public event that the Council of Faiths has mounted in its history. Rather than write loads of new stuff about the exhibition here, I'd rather refer anyone who hasn't already seen the earliest entries in this blog to go back to the start and see the full week's worth about what went on at Highcross.

Having said that, I would like to add a little, from an unexpected source. I posted this entry on the morning of Tuesday 29 December, shortly before catching a train to London, where I visited an exhibition at the Design Museum, entitled, "Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams". Rams was the chief designer for the Braun electrical consumer goods company in Germany, whose principles and practices had a significant influence on the aesthetic of everyday life from the late 1950s onwards. In the texts on display that accompanied the exhibition, there were two statements that resonated with me when I thought about their relation to the exhibition we put on at Highcross. One text stated how Rams's designs "used different materials and colours but they all reflect a single sensibility", another how he adopted "restrained simplicity as the route to order in a chaotic world." Though speaking about something utterly different - and purely coincidental - both these quotes stood out enough for me to copy them down and want to add them here. Potentially, the exhibition at Highcross could have been chaotic. For many people, inter-faith work itself is chaotic and muddled. Several people, out of perfectly sound motives, asked for certain elements to be featured - pictures (photos of places, paintings illustrating sacred themes, portraits of special people), artifacts, music, food and drink, ready-made exhibitions that had been used on earlier occasions, one source even offered to come along with a number of helpers to build what sounded like a semi-permanent structure out of wood. While all these offers were appreciated and acknowledged, they would have made the Highcross exhibition a ragtag jumble, without theme or dynamic, not following any kind of line or narrative - and not linked to the other material the Council of Faiths had already produced (our series of leaflet and our new website). Some might have looked at what we presented there during National Inter Faith Week and wondered how such a display could have taken so many weeks in the planning and execution. For me, those two quotations in the Dieter Rams exhibition expressed perfectly how I would want to encapsulate the spirit of what we showed in Highcross that week, and that is now a lasting legacy for promotion of our work in Leicester: "different materials and colours but they all reflect a single sensibility"; "restrained simplicity as the route to order in a chaotic world."

Well, I'm not going to apologise for this significant and successful event not making number one in the list. However, I imagine that the entries that take up the top two slots will be surprising!