3 - 2000

EXPO 2000 - More than a Show?

Spirituality - the secret second theme of the World’s Fair

Traces of religion found at the EXPO

by Thomas Bastar

The EXPO 2000 World’s Fair in Hanover is drawing millions of visitors - and is renewing the public debates in Germany about whether such giant productions make sense. Walking around the grounds, the author of this article came to the conclusion that a EXPO’s message is, religious needs are to be taken seriously. But its second message is the claim of the relativity of all religions.

Ancient mountain gods and modern seekers after truth, food rituals and altars of love; visitors to the EXPO find religious themes everywhere, even in the most unexpected places.

Abdou is a twelve-year-old Berber boy. He wants to know how the world came to be. So he travels with a caravan to Cairo, and there in the great library he meets a girl called Dyamila, who knows how to use computers and the Internet. Together they send his question electronically out into all of the world. From children in the USA and Tibet, Germany and Namibia, answers come back - many different answers, from the religious and mythological traditions of many peoples. Finally Abdou realises that there is not just one truth, but rather, every culture has its own truth.

At any rate, that is the way Nikolai Karo tells this story in its essence. Karo is a film director, who has made a name for himself with suggestive promotional films. He made the 15-minute film "Star-Catcher (Sternenfänger)" for the Bertelsmann Group, about Abdou the Berber boy and his search for the truth. This film is the media group’s main exhibit at EXPO 2000, and may be seen in the often overcrowded "Planet m", Bertelsmann’s spaceship-shaped pavilion in Hanover.

The film is intended to make clear Bertelsmann’s business philosophy of tolerance towards all cultural traditions. But a second message travels with it - the relativity of truth. To the question, where do we come from? There is no one universally true answer. Instead, "all cultures, and all people in these cultures, have their own answers to that question," says Nico Hofmann, the producer of the Bertelsmann film.

It is not by chance that Bertelsmann dignifies its self-portrayal with what is after all a religious question. Even though the World’s Fair in Hanover is supposed to be about sustainable, environment-friendly technologies, religion and spirituality are nevertheless its secret secondary theme. This is not only because Christianity is conspicuously present, with the Pavilion of Christ in the very centre of the EXPO Plaza, the Vatican pavilion at the main west entrance and the YMCA pavilion at the south end. Many of the national pavilions as well have decorated their exhibits with their own religions, from the Asian states to the eastern European Orthodox countries, or Africa with its nature religions. Even Canada cannot do without its Native American totem pole. The Palestinian Autonomous Authority is exhibiting three religions at once: Christianity with Nativity and Last Supper scenes carved from olive wood, Islam with a model of the Dome of the Rock, and the ancient Canaanite religion with the gods El, Ashera and Baal.

But echoes of religion or spirituality are also found in many places around the EXPO where one does not expect them. For example, in the exhibit on the "Future of Work" there is a collection of facts on the history of human work spread across two walls, which has, as a watchword running through it, Genesis 3:19: "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread."

The "golden pig" placed by the ecology-oriented Schweisfurth Foundation at the entrance to its exhibit on nutrition is intended as a secular object, but recalls all too plainly the Golden Calf in the Bible. The work of a Russian artist, it is supposed to inspire respect for a fellow creature. According to Ulrich Frohnmeyer, the director of the thematic area on nutrition, it should lead us to "do honour to the pig which we are about to consume". A secular message or a spiritual appeal? A "shameful insult to the dignity of animals" was the opinion which one EXPO visitor scrawled with chalk on the information plaque.

The "Planet of Visions", the section of the thematic area devoted to human Utopias, is unambiguously Biblical. There is a model of the Garden of Eden, a paradise hanging under the ceiling, out of human reach, and a Tower of Babel as a theatre backdrop the height of the building. The hanging garden of paradise is surrounded by pictures of paradise as conceived by many cultures of the world.

The religious traditions of various peoples also appear in the exhibit "Mount and Mystery" which Reinhold Messner, the mountaineer from the southern Tyrol, is showing in the middle station of the EXPO cable car. It includes the holy mountains of Tibet, Mt. Olympus as the home of the gods, pre-Christian offerings to the mountain gods of the Alps, and of course the myth of the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, which Messner sees as embodying the fear of the wilderness.

Not only mountains lead to thoughts of God; eating and drinking have much to do with religion. In the area on nutrition there is no lack of religious metaphors, such as the "laptop-altar" reflecting rituals around food. The altar, in the form of a gigantic computer, displays a confused jumble of objects having to do with sacred and secular feeding rituals: loaves of bread, plates and knives decorated with beads; a huge baby bottle; first communion candles, death’s-heads made of seeds, kitschy statuettes of martyrs, masks made of bread, a picture of the "Jolliest Beer-Belly in Germany" contest, and a student society’s book of drinking songs.

The information plaque informs the visitor that all this is about "ceremonies, sacrifices, and rites of thanksgiving for weddings, baptisms, burials, harvest festivals and the Lord’s Supper". The Lord’s Supper does not fit very well into this exhibit. But the point is that everything goes with everything else - profane and sacred, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, everything together on one altar.

This message is made perfectly clear in the area of the theme park devoted to "Basic Needs". The exhibit begins with two standing figures from Bolivia, which are all hung about with what the artist thinks people need: pasta, coffee, Coca-Cola, video camera, TV set, car. The figures are labelled "Gods of Affluence and Happiness". Fair enough, this would indeed be universally true, for consumer culture has now spread around the world.

The exhibit continues with the needs for clean air and drinking water. Mexico City is represented here as a panorama of colourful figures. Clay angels hover near the ceiling, the Angel of Light is wearing a gas mask, death pops up as skeletons in many forms. But in the end, a sign explains, death will be defeated by the government’s clean air policies, represented by subways, park areas, and car inspections. And flowers, animals and a human being are seen sprouting from the skeleton laid low on the ground. A modern myth.

The exhibit finishes by presenting spirituality directly as a basic need, entitled "The Universe Within". Photos by Hollywood star Richard Gere - for the most part, out-of-focus black and white pictures of Tibetan monks, temples and landscapes - are evidently supposed to express the need for religious experience. The walkway that goes past the walls full of photographs leads to two colourful shrines, labelled as "Altars of Love". The smaller of them is a sort of printer’s type-case with its compartments filled with all kinds of religious utensils: prayer beads, pictures of a mosque, a star of David, picture cards of Jesus and Mary, statuettes of Indian gods, verses from the Koran, all mixed together.

"A home altar enables an immediate, daily encounter with the divine, as with an equal", proclaims a sign. In view of globalization, which shrinks the space available to individual persons, this is especially necessary. The type-case altar was created by an Indian painter as an "act of healing". It is meant to replace the temple that was to be built in Ayodhaya, India, upon the ruins of a mosque which was destroyed by fanatics in 1992. By putting all religions on the same level, the artist is trying to urge us to be tolerant.

The second of the two shrines also brings together different religious and pseudo-religious traditions: kitschy images of Mary next to amulets, a US flag next to Indian cult pictures, dollar signs made of clay next to crosses sprinkled with coloured sequins. This shrine, the onlooker is further informed, has been blessed by the Dalai Lama personally.

The message is that anything goes, anything is possible - best of all if it somehow comes from the East. Syncretism, the mixing of all religions together on a completely equal basis, is a hot item at the EXPO.

This is confirmed by a further observation: on entering the Global House, in which the EXPO presents some of its world-wide projects, one comes immediately to the Baha’i stand. This religious society, which originated in Iran, is based primarily on the writings of Baha’ullah, its founder, but also on the sacred writings of all world religions. Its central tenet of faith is that all peoples and religions receive their various insights from one heavenly source.

To each his/her own truth. For that, you are at the right address with the quasi-interconfessional Baha’is. The view that subscribes to the relativity of all religions is a pervasive underlying feature - intentional or not - of the EXPO. Christians who believe in the one and universal truth of Christ could easily be seen, in this context, as intolerant. It would be in their own interest to make the difference properly clear between tolerance, and getting along with those of other views, and syncretism, which considers everything of equal value.

Or we have perhaps misunderstood the EXPO’s slogan, "Humanity - Nature - Technology: a new world arising"? Instead of a world of peace and tolerance, is it rather one of syncretism and anything goes? Has the time come for Jews and Christians to rehabilitate the ancient god Baal?

This article is taken from the Deutsches Allgemeine Sonntagsblatt for 30 June 2000.