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Ekaterina Degot peers into the abyss. With this year\u2019s festival programme the director of the steirischer herbst leads us to the crumbling edges of the comfort zones of our society, which are rapidly losing firm ground due to the multiple crises of the present and where space is only available to those who can afford it.<\/p>\n
For this year\u2019s festival motto Degot seizes a metaphor of the Hungarian philosopher and literary critic Georg Luk\u00e1cs, who strongly influenced the Frankfurt School with his writings on Marxist philosophy. At the same time, however, he also caused numerous controversial debates in the intellectual circles of his time. In the middle of the last century Luk\u00e1cs already saw that the intellectuals had become complacent in a hedonistic comfort zone far removed from reality and were thus indirectly, even if unintentionally or carelessly, complicit with the bourgeois circles of big business: Luk\u00e1cs called this comfort zone on the brink of the abyss \u201cGrand Hotel Abyss\u201d \u2013 a metaphor which Degot has chosen as the festival motto of this year\u2019s steirischer herbst..<\/p>\n
Because Luk\u00e1cs\u2019 old metaphor has developed a new urgency against the backdrop of a digital society which is disintegrating into its filter bubbles and has made way for the society-dividing populism of the present, the succinct statement by then Foreign Minister Kurz, \u201cIt won\u2019t do without unpleasant pictures,\u201d has become a popular catchphrase today. The intellectual elites have come to a comfortable arrangement with this loss of humanity: on the sidelines of symposia and receptions one complains about the refugee crisis, climate change, and warns of the forces of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence crumbling social structures, only to a moment later book a flight on fluege.de for a hiking trip to Morocco and for this purpose order on Amazon the necessary activewear produced by child labour in Bangladesh.<\/p>\n
Die intellektuellen Eliten haben sich mit diesem Menschlichkeitsverlust bequem arrangiert: Am Rande von Symposien und Empf\u00e4ngen beklagt man die Fl\u00fcchtlingskrise, den Klimawandel und warnt vor den die Gesellschaftsstrukturen zersetzenden Kr\u00e4ften von Big Data und K\u00fcnstlicher Intelligenz, nur um sich im n\u00e4chsten Moment auf fluege.de einen Flug f\u00fcr eine Wanderwoche in Marokko zu buchen und sich daf\u00fcr auf Amazon die passende Funktionsw\u00e4sche zu bestellen, die\u00a0 mithilfe von Kinderarbeit in Bangladesch hergestellt wurde.<\/p>\n
At this year\u2019s steirischer herbst, Ekatarina Degot does again what she does best: she takes up highly political societal findings in order to put them up for debate in the world of art itself. The more than forty international artists of the steirischer herbst pursue this in the form of installations, performances, and discursive projects. Among them is the Polish artist Artur \u017bmijewski, who seeks shelter from the impending political disaster and growing nationalism in a vacant Grazer shop. With his installation Plan B<\/em> he creates a safe haven with apocalyptic charm that could serve many \u2013 whether they be right-wing populists expelled from office, or the artists who flee precisely from those.<\/p>\n