Research Catalogue

How can writing as an entangling practice of “artistic research” contribute to an understanding of these processes? Can the figure of “Trans” as prefix (see method and title of the project: “Trans*Writing”), which is addressing the movement of crossing, be promoted as new thinking pattern for a writing that has the immanent tendency to exceed meanings, bodies, subjects, settings, knowledge, lives, spaces etc.?

Live-Blog on WHAT IF? Perspektivenwechsel in der Kulturvermittlung 4. Internationales Symposium Kulturvermittlung Veranstaltungsort Festspielhaus St. Pölten Kulturbezirk 2 A-3100 St. Pölten

This fragmented text project belongs to WHICH DANCES A choreographic assemblage Aluminum is a self-evident, dangerous preciousness. We are surrounded by aluminum in the form of objects, fabrics and in countless invisible compounds. The practical elegance and easy malleability that make aluminum one of the most used materials in our society is combined with the high energy expenditure of its production and the ecological destruction that accompanies it. which dances approaches the dynamics of the material with actions and dances, texts, sounds, film, light, darkness and conversations. For which dances, this means seeking out practices and narratives of recycling, environmentally friendly production, resistance, and learning from biological processes and using them as a basis for aesthetic speculation. In the age of the Anthropocene, new forms of coexistence between all life forms have yet to be explored. For example, in Kolontár, Hungary after the MAL AG (Magyar Alumínium) industrial accident, beech trees were planted to remove the heavy metals from the red mud spill from the soil. Or there are reports of ways to remove aluminum from the body with foods containing silicon. which dances is situated in the field of art and ecology, based on the conviction that art, with its interdisciplinary language, can mediate between nature and man in relation to existing environmental problems and thus change the spheres of life of the various forms of existence on earth for the better. The project is a choreographic assemblage in which human and non-human actors interact. which dances moves along the transitions of performance of performing and visual arts and explores new presentation practices that deal with the intertwining of the notion of subject and object and the performance of material and immaterial practices. To this end, the artistic team consisting of Sabina Holzer, Jack Hauser, Elisabeth Schäfer, Brigitte Wilfing and Thomas Wagensommerer turns its attention to aluminum and explores the aesthetic, material, socio- and pop-cultural entanglements that this material activates. We refer to the transdisciplinary, transmedial and transversal approach of new materialism and its critical engagements with the Anthropocene. The artistic setting, which is open to the public, stretches over a period of one week and takes the form of a choreographic assemblage of various interconnections of the material aluminum - everyday use, material, geology, anatomy. The choreographic structure is informed by the different material references and is composed of spatial design, dances, texts, film, sound and a series of lectures and interventions. Visitors co-create this assemblage over the course of a week and are an active part of the choreography. They do this through their physical presence and are invited to bring material, or to further shape / write and dance with existing materials. Dancing here means a physical entering into relationship and touching / reading mediated by simple everyday gestures of grasping, placing, laying down. See more: https://www.volkskundemuseum.at/whichdances

This open exposition was designed by Elisabeth Schäfer, Paul-Julien Robert, and Ida Clay as members of the PPC FWF PEEK project to critically examine the history of the Mühl "commune"/sect at Friedrichshof/Burgenland Austria. Founded by the Viennese Actionist artist Otto Mühl in 1972 and dissolved by the Communards in 1990, the "AA Commune" was initially dedicated to raising awareness of habitualization through domination in everyday socio-cultural life practice and to liberating people from the sphere of influence of powerful social institutions. Their declared goal was to overcome authoritarian institutions such as the state, the church, the bourgeois family, capitalism, and patriarchy with the help of science, art, and liberated sexuality. The social experiment ended in a highly authoritarian system within a controlled community. Mühl was sentenced to seven years in prison for multiple sexual abuse. Together with contemporary witnesses, the project strives for a re-examination and reappraisal of the commune and its effects through "research in and through the arts" by building a research space collaboratively designed by artists, contemporary witnesses and scholars as a reservoir for the joint exploration of individual and collective historical aspects of the AAO: (Re)writing of Reality Through Discourse. This open exposition is one share of this (re-)writing through discourse. It presents an overview and excerpt from the three-year artistic research project in the form of a research landscape in which various formats can be visited as stages of research. In the form of a mapping we have embedded audio, video and text products into the research landscape of our project. Central locations of this landscape are the Friedrichshof in Burgenland, Austria, site of the former "commune"/sect & the Volkskunde Museum Vienna as national cooperation partner of the project. Title of the project: PPC - Performing Primal Communism. (Re)writing of Reality Through Discourse Principal investigator: Paul-Julien Robert Project Team: Ida Clay, Thomas Marschall, Elisabeth Schäfer Research location: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (Institute of Fine Arts | IBK) | Karl-Schweighofergasse 3 | 1070 Vienna Cooperation partner: Volkskundemuseum Wien Funding: PPC is an FWF PEEK project [AR568] Project duration: 2020-2023

Performance philosophy is still something of a ‘wild frontier’ where fundamental questions can be re-posed concerning the nature of wisdom and love, life and truth. For if love and wisdom are not co-extensive with verbal communication, then philosophy may be legitimately pursued by performative means. In this session the participants aim is to enact and unfold a set of trajectories rather than describe or 'define' their work in words alone. Passion and grief are disruptive currencies. Passion and grief not only seem un-necessary for biological life, they frequently threaten it. Yet a life lived without them would seem impoverished. Whether one views these turbulent affects as parasites, invaders, or as the engines of higher culture, they inhabit philosophy as an ineradicable black-market haunts all states and empires. We aim to consider this under-zone on its own terms, weaving theory with demonstrations of transferable techniques for cross-disciplinary research.