13.07. – 17.07. 2022
How does change work? This year’s Elevate Festival in Graz deals with this question, which this year has the motto TRANSITION.
With its interdisciplinary program of discourse, art and music, the Graz Elevate Festival has long since established itself as a place for critical-political discourse on future issues of democracy, fundamental rights and freedoms and the shaping of the necessary social-ecological change.
This year, the festival motto TRANSITION forms the programmatic framework.
The political economist and transformation expert Maja Göpel researches economic concepts that could make it possible to establish socially just societies and sustainable economic systems. With her bestseller “Rethinking our world”, she has also given important impetus to this discourse outside the scientific economic community
Sociologist Daniel Görtz, aka Hanzi Freinacht, might be able to offer some thoughts on the question what the term “metamodern society” might mean.
Görtz is formulating a philosophical-ideological concept that focuses on the following questions: What is the unique role of mankind in the ecosystems of nature? How can better processes for the personal development of the individual be created? And finally: How can the mechanisms and modes of action of politics be adapted to an increasingly complex world?
Görtz formulates theses that may seem counterintuitive from a perspective of modernistic or postmodernistic point of view. This is precisely why it is all the more lively to discuss them.
What changes do our societies need with regard to the mental health of people in our digital urban societies, which are increasingly dominated by crises, war, mass surveillance and the dissolution of privacy – this is the subject of a discussion with Indy Johar, who set up the field laboratory Dark Matter to think about radical redesign of the bureaucratic and institutional infrastructure of our cities, together with Görtz and Göpel.
During the Elevate Festival, the Graz Schloßberg will be shaped by the art installation “Digital Dictatorships” by Zara Alexandrova and Zoran Georgiev. With reference to the democratically completely uncontrollable social and economic power of the large social networks, the project, which is being implemented by the Elevate Festival in cooperation with the Institute for Art in Public Space Styria and the Kutlurvermittlung Steiermark, makes visible where the true dictatorships are to be found today , who, through their extensive possession of their users’ personal data, have set up a system of algorithm-driven data totalitarianism.
The festival’s music and VJ program ranges from Caterina Barberini to DJ Durbin & Yushh to the Graz psych rock formation Jigsaw Beggars.
Elevate Festival 2022
Graz, various locations
13.07. – 17.07. 2022
www.elevate.at
