Françoise Schein

and team

Nils Le Bot, architect
Miriam Heipertz, law and human rights specialist

Our 10 meters long Banquet offers the city of Vienna a strong and manifest sign for Human Rights on its “Platz der Menschenrechte”.

It is a symbol that raises the public’s awareness of fundamental Human Rights issues and creates a space of negotiation, exchange and discourse for Vienna’s citizens and guests. It is an art piece whose aesthetic touches its spectators emotionally, but also serves as a tool for education, understanding and dissemination.

The approximately 10-meter-long banquet table is covered by tiles. Into each hand made plate one of the 30 articles of the 1949 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is silkscreened in German and English language.
Cutlery, glasses and napkins are painted next to the plates. The table is set to serve a grand banquet for 64 guests. “Eating the Human Rights” , a meal on a plate, it becomes clear that human rights are in fact mental food.

The centre of the banquet table is dedicated to a stylized cartography of the Danube  river which Quotes on Human Rights of world philosophers and writers from the antiquity to nowadays are embedded into the river’s stream. All along the Danube, the names of all current “Human Rights Cities” appear and illustrate and reinforce the notion of a world network of Human Rights Cities amongst which Vienna is the centre.

The river map becomes  a metaphor for the permanent flow of ideas, goods and people and retraces the long and diverse history of Human Rights thought.

Copyrights Assiociation Inscrire and Francoise Schein and 2018