2002

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“Faced with the explosive dynamics of economic globalization and renationalist trends, many social achievements of recent decades are today being challenged; phenomena of globalization and the fears they engender are being countered in a process of populist agitation, all too often based on the logic of simplification, by means of reductionist explanations of the world and demonizations. The construction of the alien plays a key role in this context charged with prejudice.
Steirischer herbst 2002 sets out—self-reflectively, but by no means self-referentially—consciously to perceive and focus on its own position as a potential foreign body. The aim is to analyse and offer models of dialogue, but not provocation or uncritical affirmation. Understanding—not appropriating—the other becomes a substantial form of an experience of reality characterised by art.”
—Peter Oswald (original booklet translation)

Fremdkörper (Foreign Bodies) was the overarching theme of steirischer herbst ’02, which examined the construction of the foreign and the other, “in the explosive dynamics of economic globalization and return to nationalist tendencies.” It was thus about how the foreign is instrumentalized to “affirm one’s own identity when confronted with exclusionary agitation” and simultaneously about how social and personal fears are provoked, but also about the foreign body of the avant-garde movement “as a thorn in the side of bourgeois comfort and affirmative normality” (program booklet).

The opening was held at the Schauspielhaus with a concert by the South African singer Brenda Fassie as the prelude to the project Enactments of the Self (curator: Maia Damianovic). For one month, artistic projects that gave “form to the notion of the existential” by approaching the concept of identity narratively were staged on the Enactments Stage at the Schauspielhaus as well as in public space (program booklet).

The exhibition Latente Utopien (Latent Utopias), curated by Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, presented experiments in contemporary architecture at the Landesmuseum Joanneum. At the Schauspielhaus, the Austrian premieres of Elfriede Jelinek’s three princess dramas, Der Tod und das Mädchen I–III, were presented under three different directors (Brigitte Landes, Marc von Henning, and Ruedi Häusermann), as well as Salvatore Sciarrino’s opera Macbeth—Drei namenlose Akte. Following the concertante premiere of Beat Furrer’s Begehren (Desire) at steirischer herbst ’01, the staged performance of it by Reinhold Hoffmann, with a stage set by Zaha Hadid, premiered in the recently completed Helmut List Halle on January 9, 2003 (still as part of steirischer herbst ’02).

Program