Interdisciplinary Workshop, Salzburg, 24/06/2025

Unipark Nonntal, room 2.105

Concept and Organisation: Thomas Traupmann

The workshop explores the intermingling of artistic interventions and activist practices in contemporary arts and theatre. Its aim is not to merely search for the politics within the aesthetics but rather to read for and look for certain forms and their use. Seminal studies from the last decade have shown the crucial function of forms for transporting and provoking affects (E. Brinkema) and as an organising principle, structuring both culture and politics and thereby fundamentally shaping our social experiences (C. Levine). The workshop will focus on the visual formal language of artistic-activist interventions: on installations, sculptures, architectures, performances, happenings, choreographies, bodies in movement etc. This implies static and persistent as well as dynamic and ephemeral forms, their distinct temporality, their relation to space (especially to the public sphere), their various possibilities of constellation, configuration, and collision, but also the respective praxeologies. Emphasising shapes, patterns, and arrangements hopefully will not only reveal forms as the pivotal elements of artistic activism but also—with themselves being resistant—challenge our own analytical scope.

09:00–09:15

THOMAS TRAUPMANN: Introduction

09:15–10:30

ULRIKE HATZER: Performing (in) the Fugue: Of Small Gestures & Performative Invitations

10:45–12:00

NICOLE HAITZINGER & GWENDOLIN LEHNERER: Rehearsing Resistance: Collective Curating and Embodied Artevism

13:30–14:45

PETER DEUTSCHMANN: Looking Back on Post-Soviet Activism. What now?

15:00–16:15

MARY COSGROVE: Means and Ends: The Zentrum für Politische Schönheit Aktion “Sucht nach uns!” (2019)

16:15

Closing Remarks