The Vision

People are different. Their cultures are different. Their habits are different. Their religions are different. Their languages are different. Differences separate people, making it difficult for living together.
Rivers separate people, sometimes states from states. Borders separate states from states and people from people.

People of different cultures can live together. People of different habits can live together. People of different religions can live together. People from one side and the other of a river can live together. People from one side and the other of borders can live together. Borders are surmountable. Rivers can be spanned via bridges. Bridges can bring people together.
Beyond differences, bridges between state and man can be constructed.
Beyond the differences in people there is humanity.
Art can build bridges between people.

Visions can become true

People make art. They paint, sketch, sculpt, photograph, and print. They compare their works, participate in contests and are motivated through the positive from the critic. They work all over the world. German or Polish, Czech or American, Latin American or Asian. They work impartially from their race, employment, or class - men and women, director and employee, officers and soldiers, masters and apprentices, boss and secretary, doctor and nurse. They build bridges with their art, symbolic or real. They build bridges among each other and to each other, spanning and surmounting their differences.
People span their borders from both sides through collective artwork.
There is always many who constantly come to this place, working under the best guidance from world renown artists, comparing and sharing their works, finding and exercising a universal language; art, the artistic work, living in their creations.
Regardless of any differences they live as a part of humanity together.
What they achieve and experience changes them and their lives. They take their experiences with them and change their environment. They build bridges from man to man, state to state, culture to culture, and religion to religion. This is no unrealistic statement but is actually in reality proven and lived.

The Société Imaginaire, People realizing visions

People from all over the world create a network. Prominent personalities from politics, science, economics, and culture belong to it. Presidents and ministers, artists and scientists, surgeons and generals, ambassadors and envoys, and for the long term harmony of living together, artists are the ones that make this possible.

The most prominent of these people, statesmen, writers, artists, and many others handwrite their personal texts while other artists illustrate them with their own works. Portfolios of such collective works are exceptionally produced, enriching the world and are submitted into such renown collections as that of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Czeslaw Milosz, Alvaro Mutis, Arthur Miller, Mark Strand, Hans Magnus Enzensberger are personalities who stand for the vision. Richard von Weizäcker, Julio Maria Sanguinetti, Kurt Biedenkopf, Wolfgang Clement, Hilmar Kopper or Wolfgang Ischinger and many others are bound in the promotion of its ideas.

All feel obligated towards the vision and use their status to contribute towards the overcoming of borders and the principle of peaceful coexistence. The Société Imaginaire stands for the vision, for the method of its development, for the known and unknown people whom in the progression of the vision are tied together.

Batuz, Heart and Soul

Batuz, the world renown artist is the heart and soul of the idea and the vision. He has developed it, lives it and has not only brought people from the elite together but in all many, whom through the works of the Société Imaginaire have been tied close together. He stands for the method and the progressive activities that unites the people in the principle of peaceful coexistence. He stands for the organization of the Batuz Foundation which has been already for the past twenty years dedicated to the task of bringing together foreign cultures and societies in a long term relationship. Batuz is the heart and soul of this happening.

Altzella as the focal point for a worldwide event

Altzella is a cloister in Saxony. Old buildings house new lives with a new purpose. Artists from around the world create worthy pieces, work together, utilizing the newly installed studios. World renown laureates from many different countries here create graphic portfolios which prestigious museums enrich their collections with. Various students from many countries and continents meet here, year after year, live together, work, create under the auspices of well known artists and professors. Winners from large scale competitions meet together for workshops. Up and coming artists also meet and work together. Exceptional museums in Altzella are open to the public of Saxony and its visitors. People from Saxony will be a part of this global occurrence. Altzella visits the world and the world visits it. The old cloister serves as the middle point for the network and the living together beyond borders.

The Future

What today has occurred will be extended worldwide. The network will be further tied together, the worldwide communication further extended. People from troubled lands will come together within the gathered creatively artistic approach. The Société Imaginaire has the resolution for such in troubled lands. Serbian and Albanian, Palestinian and Israelis, people from different perspectives from their war torn lands gain a new horizon. The worldwide integration utilized will promote the idea and the vision through their associates.
Further programs will be installed in Altzella.
The financing will become secured, private and public funding will see to it. The management will be further tuned and improved. Further partners will be tied together.

People from the unsettled world torn with conflict, where they are separated from one another and alienated, will be able to overcome such through the creative process. And through which they may influence their surroundings on their return. The Société Imaginaire proposes for the future a gradually growing opportunity where in this world a new and different possibility is arising. One that is worthwhile to live in.

Hans Peter von Kirchbach
Ex Commander in Chief
of the German Armed Forces