NEWS RELEASE:
10th of march 1995

Letter

Time is running. The end of the Summit is near and so is the end of the UN-happening. For us it has been an intensive week and we have had loads of people asking about the happening and the meaning behind it. We have had so many positive reactions and comments and we have been busy at the stall at the NGO-forum.

We held a press-conference yesterday where only four interested journalists showed up. Bad luck, but we´ll have to admit that we haven´t really lacked attention from the massmedias. Eventhough the press-coverage has quitened down, we still had a visit from the Summit-radio (a broadcast-network on the Danish channel 3, which has news all day long in five languages) who wanted an interview, and made the frontpage on "The European" on their 10.th-16th. of March issue.

Yesterday school-children from all over Copenhagen came out to the NGO and made their way round all the different stalls, picking up posters, leaflets ect. When they ended up at our stall they were both curious about and frightend by the symbolic meaning of the dolls and the certificates. Some of them knew about the whole thing in advance and just wanted another handfull of certificates, but others didn´t really know how to handle all the little notes - if they really were a human life?? It is like children do not have the same filter of consciousness as adults, hence they grasp things in a much more direct way... Like two little girls who had been looking at the dollsand suddenly one says: What is that? - It´s a dead child, says the other, and the first one replies with fear and discust - Adwwrr, isn´t that horrible! This little girl definately saw the dolls as real human beings. If only grown-ups had the same conception of things! Perhaps we´d have more powerful results at the Summit.

To visualize the meaning of the happening futher, Jens Galschiøt and his activists will start gathering the dolls Saturday morning (the 11th.) and pile them up on a pyramidic frame.

The pyramid of dead children is to stand as a picture of reality on the 210.000 children who succumbed to starvation or diseases this week. And it will stand on a square opposite the official Summit´s Globe, which has been build as a symbol of the cooperation and good spirit that resulted in the Summit-declaration. To put it frankly - it is the actual reality opposite the illusion of reality. The fact is that the rich Western countries are not willing to "sacrifice" any of their abundant welfare, to help solve the poverty-problems in the world.

We hope this last provocative statement will make people think and increase the awareness of the unequal distribution of wealth between the rich and poor countries - make people conscious of the decisions made in the Western world and the consequences - 13 million dying children in 1995.

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