Digital Research Travelogues through European Archives creates an interdisciplinary platform for art and science to explore the current politics of forgetting in relation to three traumatic events of the 20th century: Belgium (colonialism in the Congo), Austria (antisemitism in World War II and the post-war period), and the former Yugoslavia (turbo-nationalism, Srebrenica genocide). The platform departs from the research conducted as part of the FWF-PEEK project Genealogy of Amnesia: Rethinking the Past for a New Future of Conviviality (AR 439). It was presented as a digital format to promote emancipatory politics in the humanities through the 2020-2021 exhibition at the Weltmuseum Wien, Austria. It consisted of 42 interviews presented as 42 posters with QR codes. This part of the exhibition was a unique artistic-scientific and collaborative research work, presented as an interactive digital installation. The 42 QR codes were divided into three sections, each with a description and content, and accessible to the viewer via mobile phone. Each user could listen to the interviews in English. As a second level of interaction, an interactive table was presented in the exhibition space, allowing the viewer to spend hours exploring the connections between the three sections presented in parallel through images and texts, as a kind of double index, footnotes and hypertexts through European trauma histories.
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, Sophie Uitz, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
Presentations by: Marina Gržinić, professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Jovita Pristovšek, Šefik Tatlić, postdoc researchers, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
The program will be held in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.
October 12, 2019 Linz Workshop: 25 years anniversary of maiz
WORKSHOP, PART OF 25 YEARS ANNIVERSARY OF MAIZ
Where: Altes Rathaus, Linz
Date: 12.10.2019
Taking part in the discussion: Rodrigo Cesar Benedetti, Chiara Benedetti, Michaela Lehofer, Nadja Meisterhans, Ursula M. Lücke, and Rubia Salgado
WORKSHOP TITLE: Fighting racism, deconstructing white privilege-cultural interventions, artistic projects, political strategies
Marina Gržinić in collaboration with Tjaša Kancler trans*activist, researcher
In the workshop, we depart from the research we did, Tjaša Kancler trans*activists and me, on questions of knowledge resistance and trans*. Therefore in the first part of the workshop, I presented artistic projects that have contributed historically and currently to the production of discourses, activities, politics, labor, education in order to combat racism and structures of power. In the second part of the workshop, we discussed formats of racism, the processes of enduring racialization and modes of empowerment.
Marina Gržinić is a philosopher, theoretician, and artist. Since 2003, she is Professor for Post-Conceptual Art Practices at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. She did a series of collaborative projects with Tjaša Kancler, trans* activist, artist, researcher, and associate professor at the University of Barcelona. Kancler is a co-editor of the journal Desde el margen (www.desde-elmargen.net).
The images and chronologies in these displayed materials are coming from the catalogue/publication Words Precede Actions with the subtitle The Context of Language, Racism, Economy and Power by Marika Schmiedt published in 2018 that displays racist genealogies of discrimination and the ghettoization of the Roma people in the West and East of Europe.
One part of her analysis consists of the research of racism, linking them to histories of the relationship between race and physical anthropology. As “racist scientific results” are used in sorting and exposing bones and crania collections in the museum. This takes us via Schmiedt to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in Vienna that has one of the biggest crania collections, assembled by the Austrian anthropologist Augustin Weisbach (1837–1914) in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. The anthropological collection at the Natural History Museum in Vienna includes 40,000 objects, human remains, including skulls, bones, hair, and body drains. The collection mostly contains relics from historical and prehistoric times, but also problematic chapters of human remains that mark colonial and National Socialist times.
The other part presents a gallery of “skeletons of important Austrian men” falling out of the closet of Austrian history. All these men are not solely vicious racists, having programmatic anti-Romaism agendas, but they are all anti-Semites:
Albert Geßmann (1852–1920)
Karl Lueger (1844–1910),
Josef Weinheber (1892–1945)
Taras Borodajkewycz (1902‒1984)
Josef Weinheber (1892 – 1945) a “respected” Austrian man, poet and essayist, who was largely under the literary influences of Rainer Maria Rilke, Anton Wildgans and Karl Kraus, was a member of the Nazi Party from 1931 until 1933 and from 1944 on. He committed at the time of the advance of the Red Army, leaving behind a clear-sighted parting letter. He was buried in the village of Kirchstetten, Austria, where he had lived since 1936. The municipality and the citizens of Kirchstetten, have honored for years the “great poet” Weinheber by transforming his house into a museum, dedicating a street, a square and a highway bridge in his name, decided to name a kindergarten in his honor. (From the text by Marina Grzinic in Words Precede Actions, 2018).
Lecture and introduction to Marika Schmiedt’s catalogue
by Marina Grzinic
[…] Words precede actions: language, words, and discourses have a powerful impact on concrete social issues, political decisions, media content, knowledge institutions, labor markets, the shaping of histories, memories, and subjectivities and defining of citizenship. Through mass media, public opinions, and widespread anti-Roma graffiti in public space, words have set in motion actions of constant dehumanization of the Roma, leading their conditions of poverty, segregation, and seclusion to become part of another rhetoric – the rhetoric of naturalization of these conditions. We can find at least three forms of displaying these processes of racialization in Schmiedt’s work. The second form that is as well central to the research Genealogies of amnesia displays mechanisms that I will label the gallery of “skeletons of important Austrian men” falling out of the closet of Austrian history. All these men, we are soon to learn, almost dumbstruck, are not solely vicious racists, having programmatic anti-Romaism agendas, but are all anti-Semites. Reviewing this frightening collection of men, which is by no means exclusively historical, but instead, reverberates persistently in present times, identified by generations of critical positions in Austria as the nation’s post-Nazi times. This past is preoccupying as hyper right wing neoliberal necrocapitalism is at its full power here and now.
The catalogue presentation at the VBKÖ was contextualized by an exhibition of Marika Schmiedt’s recent investigations on the Nazi-past of the Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs (VBKÖ).
March 11, 2019 – March 26, 2019 Vienna Workshop: on Hannah Arendt’s political thinking
Workshop with Ruth Kager and the students of the Art Studio for Post-conceptual Art Practices (PCAP) and the students in general of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, at AkBild, Vienna.
Hannah Arendt’s political thought centers around a political space that draws on common action. Starting from this insight, each session of the workshop is dedicated to one of Arendt’s basic notions: the public realm, the societal and the private, action, power and judging. Building on these notions, the workshop investigates the constraints and potentialities of politics as thought by Arendt.
The contents are elaborated interactively, based on the sources below. The following questions will guide, amongst others, plenary discussions and group activities.
11/3/2019 // INTRODUCTION // THE PUBLIC REALM What is the public realm? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 50-57. Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 62-73.
12/3/2019 // THE SOCIETAL AND THE PRIVATE What are the relations between the social, the private and the public realm? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 68-72. Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 81-89.
18/3/2019 // ACTION What are the characteristics of action? How is action connected to politics? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 175-180. Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 213-222.
19/3/2019 // POWER What is the difference between power and violence? How is power connected to different forms of government? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1973) [1958], The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 199-206. Arendt, Hannah (2010) [1960], Vita activa oder Vom tätigen Leben (München: Piper), 251-262.
26/3/2019 // THE DESTRUCTION OF POLITICAL POWER // JUDGING How is political power destructed? What is judging? Sources: Arendt, Hannah (1951), The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace), 123-134. Arendt, Hannah (2014) [1955], Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Antisemitismus, Imperialismus, totale Herrschaft (München: Piper) 286-307. Arendt, Hannah (1961), “The Crisis in Culture. Its Social and Its Political Significance”, in: ibid., Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking), 217-226. Arendt, Hannah (2012) [1960], “Kultur und Politik”, in: dies., Zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Übungen im politischen Denken I, herausgegeben von Ursula Ludz (München: Piper), 296-302.
A book review on the edited volume “Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism” was published on May 9, 2021 by Saša Kesić in the Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culturejournal.
Saša Kesić is an art teacher and independent researcher from Belgrade. He received his PhD in 2016 from the Department of Theory of Arts and Media, University of Arts in Belgrade. In 2020, he published the book That’s How the Queer Grew… in Contemporary Eastern European Art and Culture, in which he connected queerness, performativity and presentation.
“This volume provides a very comprehensive analysis of what was going on in former Yugoslavia, before the 1990s, in the time of the Balkan war, and after the 1990s. This is a very brave and difficult task as it is not possible to rely solely on the historical distance, as well as on the archives and documents of the past. This is the first time that such an analysis is put in parallel with the two other genocides. Furthermore, a very detailed analysis is presented regarding the changes in Europe at the fall of the Berlin Wall and then in the 1990s until today. The post-Srebrenica genocide time showed an even more bestial situation: that the Serbian society and “the Republika Srpska,”5 instead of reflecting on what happened, pushed a new dimension of amnesia. What we learn is that in Serbia oblivion changed into the glorification of the genocide. This is supported by hyper-populist and monstrous political’ nomenclature all the way to our present day when this volume is published. In the meantime, the same glorification is central for the imperial global capitalist forces – Trump is a very good case. Former Yugoslavia, in its belatedness, is another case, as it repeats on a smaller scale the Trump model. The politicians from Serbia to Slovenia (Aleksandar Vučić and Janez Janša) are such two cases.”
Excerpt from the conclusion of Saša Kesić’ review of “Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality” (Marina Gržinić, Jovita Pristovšek, and Sophie Uitz (Eds.), 2020); https://identitiesjournal.edu.mk/index.php/IJPGC/sasakesic.
