EPISODE 001 - LiteraTour - Les porteurs de projets ont la parole.

Laurent Zeimet
Bürgermeister der Gemeinde Bettemburg / Le Bourgmestre de la commune de Bettembourg

„LiteraTour“ is a festival in the commune of Bettembourg that aims to spread the joy of reading. We want to introduce people to reading, inspire them to read, fuel their interest in books, but we also want them to meet the authors of these books so they can have discussions with them, a meeting between literature and people.

Esch 2022 is also run under the motto “Remix Europe”, rethinking Europe, mixing up Europe, and how could that be better achieved than through literature, through texts, through what is written, and we want to benefit from that in Bettembourg in the context of “Literatur”. If we have a youth literature prize with a multitude of text entries from Europe, from youth from the Greater Region, from youth from Portugal, from Italy, from Kaunas, that is exactly what we want. Then the texts can be mixed up a bit, using artificial intelligence, and it will be fascinating to see, what kind of text we will be left with at the end.

Bettembourg is of course also known by its “Parc Merveilleux”, our fairy tale park, and in the “Parc Merveilleux” we have a celebrity: our giant! He has been lying there for years. Everyone who has been to the park has memories of that giant lying there, climbed onto him, maybe slid down again, and the giant is a symbol of the “Parc Merveilleux” and we have always asked ourselves: what does he do in the time when there are no people in the park… at night, does he go on an adventure? And so we thought, if we have literature at the centre for 2022 that would be a great opportunity to solve this question: what does the giant do, when he is not lying in the park? That is why we want to set up a project with all generations, where everyone can add their thoughts and ideas about what the giant does, when he is not in the park and from those different ideas and stories, we want to create a story: “The giant’s journey.” That is one of our projects. It is meant to become a cartoon, a story, but it is also meant to become a route through our commune, with stops that the giant travels to when he is not in the park.