mission statement

The expulsion into paradise

 

The dark, viscous mucus of civilisation clings to our leg like a wiener dog to a mailman. After more than 2000 years of the Occident, it has become rather clear that it is actually more like an Accident. No more sanguine morning sunbeams to guide us through the sallow swamp of our culture. The more humanity becomes alienated from nature and from one another through developments in civilisation, culture, and technology, the stronger the desire for the paradise of our primordial state of innocence as “noble savages”. Whether seen from an Islamic, a Jewish, or a Christian perspective, the idea of expulsion from the ideal garden marks the beginning of culture and civilisation. And hence, our expulsion from the perfect nudist colony goes the way it always does with all banishments: we want to get back in all the more. If once sweet fruits of knowledge were the irresistible fetish of our desire, now it is the insatiable thirst for the immaculate state of innocence. And as no one has yet figured out how to bribe the bouncers at the gates to paradise, day after day we try to create our own artificial paradises: With the tools of culture and civilisation – “guilt” in other words – we rebuild the virtual utopia of “innocence”. Since the very beginning, the idea of restoring nature through culture has sprouted strange blossoms, cultivating peculiar “gardens” as projections of our desires.

 

Faced with a world almost malignantly sickened by Homo sapiens and life-threateningly feverish from their symptoms, donaufestival 2012 – warming up for Armageddon – puts the bold thesis on the table: If we were expelled from paradise due to the deeds of guilt and culture, then let’s get back into the garden of our utopias with innocence and unculture. And if there is a tool our culture has brought forth, which puts itself into question, a tool that can approach the idea of “nature” and “innocence” like a soul mate, that bears utopian potential, a sense for possibilities, and anarchy, then it is this counter or “un”culture we commonly call art. Art as a counterforce that can question and revoke cultural processes, that communicates with nature on the same level because it refuses the dictates of cultural techniques such as structure, logic, or hierarchy.

Tomas Zierhofer-Kin (Artistic Director)