FESTIVAL DER LEISEN GESTEN (Festival of Gentle Gestures) A travelling festival: A wide variety of people with their productions join together to form a greater whole, while travelling and working to preserve their autonomy. The quiet gestures: With light luggage, the travellers meet the audience directly and at eye level. They decentralise culture and leave room for a diversity of artistic positions by limiting their reach. The journey: FESTIVAL DER LEISEN GESTEN tells a new story of travelling art forms in public space. The F. D. L. G. advances on the water. A fleet of travelling pedal boats, extended by sailing and rowing boats depending on the tour, takes artists and material from one venue to the next. The boats were specially designed for the project, are equipped with efficient pedal drives and offer space and everyday infrastructure for two travellers per boat. As far as possible, the boats and material are transported by train to a region that has waterways. There, the festival plays for several weeks in villages accessible from the water. During the tour, the travellers sleep and live on the boats, in tents on the shore or as guests of local people. This prolonged and close contact, the vulnerability that arises, creates an intense encounter with the venues and their inhabitants and, in the best case, induces them to take a new look at their home. We minimize the technical infrastructure with pleasure, travel more slowly and regionally, not in the sense of renunciation, but discovering the resulting qualities. In addition, we playfully and light-footedly try out unconventional solutions. This journey, this kind of travelling together, coping with everyday life with few and sometimes unusual means, the desire to engage in conversation with passers-by, is understood as a long-term performance over the entire period of the journey. Professional travellers can still occupy a relevant place in society today. Their view from the outside, their participation without being a permanent fixture, promotes and enlivens social life. The travel and lifestyle of travelling artists has always been part of the content of their art. It nourishes longings and assures the audience of the possibility of an alternative way of life. One could call this form of touring "international regional travel". The productions: We are convinced of the irreplaceable importance and power of the direct encounter between artist and viewer. We create intimate settings that allow the audience to open their senses to quiet and small details. Among other things, the F. D. L. G. invites the discovery of performative productions that require the artists to be present for a long time and invite direct exchange with them. We invite the population of the places we visit to stay and talk for a few days at different times of the day with a wide variety of forms of communication in public space. The palette ranges from performance to guided walks to street and portrait painters, from walk-act performances to storytelling, to on-site installations, from music to dance and theatre. Organisation: The festival seeks to collaborate with local cultural practitioners. The F. D. L. G. is a vessel, the framework in which an international group of artists embarks for a time on the adventure of encounter. Each traveller remains responsible for his or her own production. The combination of the diverse autonomies creates a larger third: FESTIVAL DER LEISE GESTEN A project with staying power Since the summer of 2020, when the idea was formulated, a network of artists from all areas of art in public space has been weaving itself. - Cultural organisers of the respective venues. - waterfront infrastructures such as harbours, camping sites, water sports rentals etc. - Specialists in sustainable lowtec solutions. - Consultants in the efficient use of physical forces. We draw from this pool for the respective tours. Traberproduktion built and provides part of the infrastructure (boats), developed and manufactured with many years of experience in recycling used materials.