Projects and offerings within WIENWOCHE 2017

WIENWOCHE 2017 offers a ten-day festival programme, including 14 projects generated in two open calls. Twelve projects were selected following a traditional open call. In the next phase, the call for the making of a “Manifesto of Ideal Work” was created as a social experiment.

Additionally, WIENWOCHE 2017 features a special opening party programme on Friday, September 22nd, with two parties on two floors at Fluc and Fluc_Wanne!
Shortly before the opening party starts, we are invited to join the “Talk Show in a hammock’ in front of Fluc, proclaiming ‘Proletarians of all countries – enjoy yourselves!“. Then the Marxist theatre revue and cabaret “Finally, we are running out of work” recalls 150 years of “Capital“, followed by their own DJ-line. DJs will also shake Fluc_Wanne as well as our politically stiff bodies with transcontinental electronic beats and live music performances.

During the following nine days, WIENWOCHE presents the different demands and urgencies of those who have something to say about work. The requests broadly vary: from workers who have limited access to free time and are being exploited in their work (The Needy Centre) to those whose right to work is either hindered by the existing border regime (Protest Production Collective) or by a one-way concept of integration (REVERSED). Against the backdrop of seasonal migrant workers using strike as a means to demand better working conditions, their story of industrial action is told by artists (Field Research).

This year’s open call has also attracted a group of scientists whose research focuses on the sociology of work. They are going to test and present their site-specific exploration but also experiment with making utopias thinkable (Working Towards Idleness). However, alternative worlds do not work without investing oneself in the efforts of both practicing economy as well as knowledge exchange differently – and beyond the prevailing monetary (and patriarchal) relations. Consequently, a new utopian initiative is launched at a skate park, where not only DIY subcultures and exchange practices are circulated, but where ‘women’ are the ones to take over free time, the sharing of skills as well as of objects (TRADE PARK).

As dolce far niente is of course about pleasure, too, and about the joy of not working, and/or working in a new way, it takes a somewhat critical look at the existing worlds of a capitalist relaxation while at the same time ironically commenting on them. WIENWOCHE will be offering a unique spa treatment experience where workers and audiences alike are going to be pampered with unique artistic anti-capitalist therapies that will already be administered in the ‘spa tram’ on the way to Sanatorium Sonnenland. Another space of regeneration, a public pool, becomes a temporary space for water-sport- and fashion-related shows as well as aqua activism (People at the Public Pool).

In the course of WIENWOCHE 2017, renown musicians are going to join in on the dolce far niente movement by distracting people from productivity, and instead entice them to dance and extend their work breaks (Musical Nomads). dolce far niente’s idea of ‘Pure Zeit’ (pure time) is also inspired by anagrammatic interventions in public space, which interpret advertising signs of vacant shops in novel ways (After Business).

Finally, WIENWOCHE 2017 joins existing discussions on work by cooperating with other cultural projects and festivals in the city: from Volksstimmefest, to Soho in Ottakring and Kunsthalle Wien.

 

Video review on WIENWOCHE 2017