2011

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“‘Second Worlds’—the name of this year’s steirischer herbst—sets out in search of cultural, social, political and psychological parallel worlds: as conceptual alternatives, models of thought, levers for a change of paradigm that suddenly allow us to see things differently. Even with a minor shift of perspective and parameters, things start to slide. It depends on the beholder’s point of view and focus whether, when looking at this world, other worlds also become visible—as is the case in an optical illusion created by Arcimboldo, that is, at the same time, a landscape, a face and a mass of foodstuff. For there must be something that we can keep sight of as a possibility, an alternative, an option or a utopia—without fearing the other or exploiting it for cheap political exclusion propaganda. With seemingly no alternative pragmatism and short term, here & now politics, our society will be unable to solve current, as well as foreseeable problems.”
—Veronica Kaup-Hasler (original booklet translation)

Zweite Welten (Second Worlds), the leitmotif of steirischer herbst ’11, set out on a search for parallel cultural, social, political, and psychological worlds. Cesena provided the entry point, with choreography by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, music by Björn Schmelzer, and scenography by Ann Veronica Janssens, at the Helmut List Halle. Instead of a festival center, this year, there was a festival district on Mariahilferstraße, with a bar, shops, minibar parties and a cinema at the Hotel Mariahilf, and a club at the Kunsthaus Graz. Premieres and performative installations by Hans Rosenström, Ann Liv Young, Orthographe, and others were presented in room 113 of the hotel.

Other premieres and first performances were the song performance Time to Get Ready for Love by Theater im Bahnhof and Rodrigo Garcia’s Gólgota Picnic at Orpheum as well as Eszter Salamon’s disembodied science fiction choreography Tales of the Bodiless at the MUMUTH. The herbst exhibition Zweite Welt (Second World), conceived by the Croatian curator collective WHW (What, How & for Whom) at the Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill and in the festival district, used “the potential of possible and impossible second worlds as a projection surface for an imaginary and political change of perspective” (with Jumana Emil Abboud, Yael Bartana, Bouchra Khalili, Daniel Knorr, Maha Maamoun, and others).

The project Hauntings at the Kunstverein Medienturm as well as a concert series in musikprotokoll and a film evening traced “secret and uncanny presences in media, art and pop,” and Hannah Hurtzig and Florian Malzacher organized a “conference on the dual citizenship of illness,” titled Der Patient (The Patient).

Program