Mission Statement

donaufestival 2010

FAILED REVOLUTIONS or
IS THE ANAESTHETIC SIMPLY TOO STRONG TO WAKE UP THE DAMNED ON THIS PLANET?

Currencies and the corresponding state entities have taught it to us: Depreciation can be created by inflation. The same goes for revolutions! Hardly any other time has spawned more revolutions than our Western late capitalist era. Advertising strategists work day and night to depreciate the notion of the revolution on technological, societal and spiritual levels by generating new ones on a running conveyor belt. Fake revolutions, naturally. They stem neither from human, and thus social, necessity, nor do they have any far-reaching consequences in societal and technological respects. On the contrary! The debasement of the idea of the revolutionary in our society goes along with the instrumentalisation of protest, revolt and anarchic excess. Anti-globalisation and environmental activists equally have their place in the system like the old leftist devotional object vendors; mohawk-styled punks (and festival organisers) like the innocuous grey-haired hippies toasting hand-in-hand with dreadlocked Twitter generation kiddies to free love with the peace pipe. Every revolutionary idea is already nipped in the bud and degenerates into a fashionable application as the fertile soil has been dug out from under its roots. But also we post-heroes in our post-revolutionary society will at one point stand up to the neck in agonising crisis floodwater. And then hell will break loose at a post-post party where the virtual cobblestones will no longer fly so peacefully through the worldwide web! Deichkind’s colourful masses are social catalytic rituals, a fusion of hysterically exaggerated hedonism with references to revolutionary gestures and symbols. At the opening, they will stage their already highly animated concert together with guests, transforming it into a discourse-operetta: a spectacle like the feverish dream of a society which in its anarchic excess might plummet into a revolution. Also the 16th century was marked by collective panic when the persecuted Anabaptists fled to Münster in order to live out their utopia. Their new society was characterised by salvation rituals, free love and mass orgies, until it was brought to the ground. Showcase Beat Le Mot use this scenario not only to bathe Hieronymus Bosch and Lucas Cranach in neon colours; above all, they reveal the Middle Ages as a laboratory of the present. Two messianic figures who relentlessly challenge traditional gender themes will infuse the festival theme with sex and revolution. Peaches will revel in her highly sexualised show with band and laser harps, and as curator she has engaged the likes of electro-beserkers Cobra Killer, the young glamour performer Theo Adams and the queer performance-party collective Ssion, amongst others. As an iconic, highly stylised art dandy, the “Gay Messiah” Rufus Wainwright has succeeded time and again in driving a spear in the flesh of mainstream American society. The immaculate messianic body appears in the midst of the illegal, queer, migrant bodies of the border-crossing cyberpunks from La Pocha Nostra and within the William S. Burroughs special, which offers a new artistic interpretation of the literary revolutionary. The artist collective Implied Violence was born in the milieu of Parenthetical Girls, Xiu Xiu, Former Ghosts and Deerhoof. Following their huge success in New York, they will be in Europe for the first time with the further development of the performance “The Dorothy K.”: a hybrid of installation, performance and happening that goes to the performers’ physical and psychic boundaries; an approach not unlike that of Julius Deutschbauer and his “Theater des Verhinderns (Theatre of Prevention)”. A performative-musical mega-project will take place in the framework of the Franz Graf exhibition in the Kunsthalle. With “Iceland Hits Danube” the artist, together with Franz Pomassl, invites important representatives from the Icelandic art network. In collaboration with the Kunsthalle, various exhibitions, installations and performances from Thomas Palme and Christian Jankowski will be realised; with the arthouse cinema “Kino im Kesselhaus” an art and short film programme curated by the Diagonale and the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen will be screened; and the Galerie Stadtpark will exhibit two installation works by the British artists Haroon Mirza and Richard Sides. At some moments the festival theme will step to the background, but only seemingly: for example, with the outward-oriented internalisation scenarios of Tindersticks, múm and Carla Bozulich, or with the psychedelic and electronic border-crossings of Panda Bear, Fuck Buttons, Dan Deacon, Max Tundra or Akufen. At other moments it will again be very present: for instance, in the case of Gob Squad who will stage a media mega-revolution with the audience in “Revolution Now!” And 400asa Sektion Nord who carry us off on a psychedelic journey through time, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the legendary Pink Floyd concert on Potsdamer Platz through the Balkan War to the here and now. Or Alec Empire who on the occasion of the 1999 1st of May demonstration in Berlin proved together with Atari Teenage Riot that the slogan “Riot sounds produce Riot” is not just an empty catchphrase. In the company of Nic Endo, CX Kidtronik and The Ex, he will again celebrate Labour Day: “So comrades, come rally!” A re-enactment?

To a better and finer failure in Krems!
Tomas Zierhofer-Kin