Office for Leaving and Letting Go
What must, may or would we like to leave behind in order to move towards a viable, sustainable future? The Office for Leaving and Letting Go (German: Amt für Lassen und Loslassen, ALL) is dedicated to this often suppressed but central question of social transformation.
Whether practices, personal or collective attitudes, patterns, structures, habits, world views, things or techniques: Everything is under scrutiny and much of it – if we really want to live well and sustainably in the future – will be allowed to pass away. Letting go and letting go will therefore increasingly accompany us in the future with all its unpleasant side effects (loss, grief, fears) and hopes (gaining freedom, satisfaction, future viability).
Our modern culture and society is predominantly geared towards progress, consumption, growth and a linear 'more'. Dealing with letting go and letting go is largely foreign, often taboo or at least hardly practised. It is against this backdrop that the Office for Letting Go and Letting Go comes into play.
The ALL raises public awareness of this future topic by elevating letting go to a public task in an artistic, participatory intervention and exploring it through research.
As an institution of the invented Colorful Ministry for Sustainable Development, Spirituality and Resonance, the ALL is refreshingly different: topics and processes of letting go and letting go are made visible, sayable and tangible in the ALL – individually and collectively. Visitors can contribute, reflect on and ritually process their concerns.
The Office for Leaving and Letting Go is ...
- a space for learning and exploration
- a place for guided self-reflection
- a real-life experiment in social transformation
- a place where the unspoken can find expression
- an artistic-scientific intervention
- an exploratory space for transformation knowledge
- a place for farewell, appreciation, mourning and new beginnings
- a place for change
Experience live the Office for Leaving and Letting Go
- 9-10 June 2026: Green Culture Festival, Kulturzentrum TOLLHAUS, Karlsruhe
- June 2026: Kaiserstraße Karlsruhe
- July 26, 2026: DAS FEST, Günther-Klotz-Anlage, Karlsruhe
- September 2-4, 2026: PartWiss 2026, Berlin
Sustainability transformation is a task for society as a whole. The office elevates the necessary letting go and letting go in an artistic act to a state task. Letting go is officially institutionalized as part of culture and receives sovereign legitimacy. Furthermore, the state takes care of it and, with the ALL, creates a contact point and meeting place for people. The ALL also serves the common good. The concerns of visitors are taken seriously and officially acknowledged by public officials. In doing so, the office and the officials are approachable, philanthropic, lively and caring.
Idea and intention
Sustainability transformation is not just about innovation and technical solutions. It also means abandoning unsustainable practices, techniques, systems, patterns and habits and saying goodbye to certain visions of the future. This touches on deep-seated convictions, values and world views and is naturally associated with resistance. The Office for Leaving and Letting Go addresses this often invisible and uncomfortable side of transformation.
The Office is a real-life experiment
The Office for Leaving and Letting Go is an experimental setting, a research and development format. It combines sustainability research, cultural and social theory, participatory research and social practice in an inviting participatory offering. It is both an intervention and a research environment.
Within the framework of the office, questions such as these are examined:
- What do people find difficult to let go of?
- What cultural patterns stabilize unsustainability?
- What emotions accompany transformation processes?
- What forms of grief, resistance or hope occur?
- How can letting go processes be supported by society?
- What role do rituals, language and institutions play?
The project works with qualitative methods of social research and in particular with transdisciplinary approaches of participatory research and reality lab, real-world lab methodology. The anonymized contributions of the visitors are – after consent – scientifically evaluated and flow into the scientific discourse as well as into the continuous further development of the office.
The research and project team
The Office for Leaving and Letting Go is a project of the Karlsruhe Transformation Center for Sustainability and Cultural Change (KAT). It is conceived and made by an interdisciplinary, dedicated team from the context of sustainability and transformation research.
Officers are:
