UVERSE – The Leipzig Book Fair's Young Creative Workshop

Thursday, 20 March 2025 00:00
Written by Portal Editor

The popular Youth Campus will return to the Leipzig Book Fair in 2025. Numerous publishers, exhibitors, and partners are participating for the first time.

With their diverse offerings, including many new open hop-on hop-off formats, they will once again make UVERSE a highly attractive event format for children and young people at the Leipzig Book Fair.

Young audiences can participate in 65 workshops

Dialogue formats rather than knowledge transfer is the motto. Young audiences can participate in 65 workshops in the Agora, Werkraum & Dschungel spaces – a further 24 workshops will take place in the Beisheim Foundation's Mentale Tankstelle. In addition, the Hacker School and The Rapid Publisher await UVERSE participants with day-long activities. School classes are also warmly welcome to the Youth Campus.

Up to 2,000 children and young people between the ages of 10 and 22 meet every year at the UVERSE in Hall 2. Following the principle of "Experience, Think, Do, Understand, Know," they will playfully explore the key themes of our (co-)existence at the Leipzig Book Fair, such as diversity and cosmopolitanism, democracy and society, creativity and culture, media and digitality. At UVERSE, they will meet publishers, initiatives, cultural practitioners, and artists who promote young people's creativity and thereby their understanding of the world we live in. The Youth Campus is a very popular destination for school groups. Registration is not required, but those who want to secure a spot should arrive at the events on time.

The UVERSE 2025 will consist of the following themes:

FOCUS – Understanding democracy, taking a stand, shaping society

HORIZON – Discovering living environments, changing perspectives, and leading discussions

JUNGLE – Getting to know media, understanding connections

WORKSPACE – Daring to experiment, creating your own

Hacking, gaming, and splashing – an excerpt from the program highlights

One of the new UVERSE partners is the Hacker School. Throughout the entire exhibition, you can learn to program your own micro:bit game with MakeCode Arcade in this hop-on, hop-off format. Young people will work at 18 programming stations under the supervision of media educators – a fast-paced format where everyone achieves results in just 20 minutes. Also new is yoggl – the JugendAPP Sachsen (AGJF Sachsen e.V.), whose workshops involve young people contributing to the development of the app to make youth spaces for democracy in Saxony visible. The Jewish Museum Berlin is also participating for the first time and will be conveying what it means to be Jewish today in its workshops at UVERSE. As a new UVERSE partner, students from the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences Dessau / Department of Design are also inviting participants to experiment with linocuts and prints in a hop-on, hop-off format – carefree messing around is very welcome! The Rapid Publisher, in cooperation with the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), a proven UVERSE partner, invites you to DIY publishing, zines & copy art. The name says it all: a booth packed with people, the photocopier spits out the young creatives' images and texts every few seconds, and The Rapid Publisher produces the individual works. Real thoughts – or a pile of mush. Both are good!

Beisheim Foundation: New UVERSE Partner

The Beisheim Foundation has long been committed to ensuring that everyone can develop their potential and play an active role in society. The aim is to strengthen the resilience of adults, as well as children and young people, and raise awareness of supporting others in times of mental health problems and crises. To achieve these goals, the foundation supports and develops projects in the areas of education, health, culture, and sports. These initiatives include, for example, the "MHFA First Aid" (Mental Health First Aid) courses in partnership with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim.

In 2025, the Beisheim Foundation will act as a sponsor and co-designer of the UVERSE Youth Campus for the first time. It brings along various project partners, including Wissensfabrik e.V. from the field of education, which will explain, for example, how to beat robots at chess or build your own AI system in a workshop. In the field of culture, the Paper Lantern Collective organizes participatory programs in which participants write songs together based on books and stories, as well as topics such as democracy. Another partner is Spinnerei e.V. with the Pochen Biennale and ISI – Institute of Playful Impulses.

They invite young people aged 16 and over to express their perspectives, visions, and emotions on the topic of "East Germany" in a creative and collaborative way in a workshop. The BayWa Foundation is committed to nutrition education without a raised finger. It is bringing its nutrition compass for elementary school children to UVERSE: six stations with materials and various tasks for children, from quizzes and memory games to guessing and movement games. At the Beisheim Foundation's Mental Refueling Station, children and young people can take a break, strengthen their minds, and participate in guided mini-workshops. Another offering is the information portal "I am everything," a collaboration with the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the LMU Munich Hospital. It provides children, young people, and their parents with evidence-based information on the prevention and treatment of depression and how to strengthen mental health.