Culture Festival: Celebrating diversity

| Meilani Halim

Culture workshops, food, sports, and a party all on the same day? Save your energy for the 20th of May, the day on which ESN Twente will bring you the long-anticipated Culture Festival! Spanning the entire Saturday, this festival offers you a day packed with a wide selection of activities including dance, language, music and fashion workshops, fun sports, culinary dishes, and a closing party featuring a live DJ playing international music.

‘The Culture Festival is a full day event where we will celebrate the cultural diversity of our university. It offers an opportunity for students of the UT as well as people from the local area to meet with each other, connect and share their cultural backgrounds,’ says Oscar Bradley, officer of Intercultural Relations at ESN Twente, whichhas collaborated with various associations at the UT to make the festival happen.

Better collaboration between associations

‘The goal of this event is to create a day where people can have fun and make new friends, while also learning something deeper about each others’ cultural backgrounds,’ adds Bradley.

The idea for the Culture Festival arose from the lack ofcommunication and collaboration between the UT's international and non-international associations’ members. ‘Then Vivian Garos, the External Relations Coordinator of ESN Twente, proposed a joint activity where we all contribute and share our foods, traditions and values with one another,’ explains Bradley. ‘After a bit of brainstorming, this grew into the Culture Festival.’

The more, the better

Co-hosting this event isPPIE, ISA, ACSSE, UT Muslims, LaVoz, SUUT, IrNUT, Unicef Studentteam Enschede, Global Lounge, and Buddy. ‘We thought that the more cultures partake in this festival, the better. Therefore, we invited every association involved in internationalisation at the UT which we could think of. This is what will allow us to have such a wide variety of cultural workshops and foods available throughout the day,’ says Bradley.

‘Two examples of this are the Sustainable Fashion workshop offered by Bello & Eco and the Hijab Fashion workshop offered by UT Muslims,’ specifies Bradley. ‘Furthermore, we wanted to encourage collaboration between the international associations of the UT. Working and organising the event together in a multicultural team has brought us all much closer as boards.’

The Program

13:00 – Kick off the event with a lunch in the Atrium

14:00 – Dance, music, fashion, and language workshops in the Vrijhof and Bastille

16:00 – Sports & Music at the Beach Volleyball courts. Gather a team and participate in a spirited game of bumperball, beachvolleyball, basketball or the traditional Indian game of Kabaddi.

19:00 – International dinner and relaxing at the Beach Volleyball courts

22:00 – Guilty Global Pleasure party in the Atrium

More information about the Culture Festival can be found on Facebook, where you can also fill in the sign-up form.

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