Hannah Hurtzig / Mobile Akademie (D)
Schwarzmarkt für nützliches Wissen und Nicht-Wissen Nr. 8

A room full of whispers, a restless and at the same time disconcerting installation, when viewed from the outside. And a strange sense of seclusion, closeness, concentration, when you are right in the middle of it. “Blackmarket” is both intimate and public; an insightful, often very private dialogue and a theatrical posit.

At fifty separate tables lighting up out of the dark, experts sit opposite one guest, changing every half hour – admission is free, the ticket for a discussion costs 1 Euro. From a safe outside position, visitors can listen in on individual conversations through headphones, suddenly up close without being noticed. In the middle of a display and production space, in which narrative formats of conveying knowledge are tested and presented.

The result is a hallucinatory adult education centre in which knowledge, life/survival strategies change hands in a non-institutional manner. During this evening, knowledge transfer as a communicative and performative act becomes a collectively whispered knowledge narrative focused on the subject of gifts.

For the gift initiates an unequal and incomplete relationship of mutual dependence, of closeness and distance. By sharing something, the people involved in this act come close to each other. At the same time, however, they drift apart, as every gift demands reciprocation, whose value is usually hard to quantify. Thus, the logic of the gift begs the question of a social relationship that is constantly in need of redefinition – and leads to confusion, waste, manipulation, humiliation or joy.

The “Blackmarket” gathers together 100 experts from a wide range of fields to discuss the ambivalent practice of giving gifts: natural scientists, beggars, media theorists, prodigies, philosophers and artists talk about suicide bombings, the economisation of the social sphere, utopian models of exchange in artist collectives and the open-source movement, managed charity, the problems of prodigies, the perversion of gifts as alms or bribes, religious solidarity, ethnological myth research, the potlatch and gift economy, and much more.

Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Christine Anderwald
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Paul Böhm
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Stefanie Carp
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Christine Frisinghelli
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Hermann Glettler
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Rainer Götz
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Robert Höldrich
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Bernhard Hurch
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Elisabeth Katschnig-Fasch
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Gery Keszler
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Aljoscha C. Neubauer
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Fritz Ostermayer
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Willibald Posch
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Wolfgang Pucher
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Marc Ries
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Helene Rucker
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Barbara Stöckl
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Ernst Strouhal
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Peter Weibel
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Sigrid Wiess-Lutz
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Wolfgang Zinggl
Mitwirkende / Mitwirkender: Josef Zollneritsch
Konzept / Idee: Hannah Hurtzig / Mobile Akademie