Festival of Vocabularies Life
Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies
30.06. – 03.07.2022
Belvedere 21, Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Wien
Festival of Vocabularies Life: Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for Re/imagining and Un/learning Vocabularies is a multimedia festival in search of cartographies of immersion and affective vocabularies of historical memories. We want to create word utterances outside the only truth of universal knowledge. We want to smash the world and recreate other worlds through our words.
Our time is specialized in creating absences: the meaning of living in society, the meaning of the experience of life. This generates a great intolerance towards those who are still able to experience the pleasure of being alive, of dancing, of singing. And it is full of small constellations of people around the world that dance, sing and make it rain. […] And my provocation about postponing the end of the world is exactly that I can always tell one more story.
– Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, 2019
A multimedia festival in search of cartographies of immersion and affective vocabularies of historical memories. We want to create word utterances outside the only truth of universal knowledge. We want to smash the world and recreate other worlds through our words. What is going on in our minds? Are we talking about the future or only about everything that is happening at the same time? Are we talking about escape routes to other possible invented worlds? Invented by whom and for whom?
We want to consider the vocabulary as a recognition of historical struggles, as a way to recognize certain groups, to question the weight of using words that are violent and how this experience brings a daily violence; to recognize other ways of using a new vocabulary that open up possibilities of struggle and celebration of the existence of a society marked by intersectional inequalities.
Our project lives with invited artists*, activists,* collectives*, individual and collaborative projects.
This festival is the outcome of collaboration between “Smashing Wor(l)ds: Cultural Practices for re/Imagining & un/Learning Vocabularies” of kulturen in bewegung (Main coordination of the project), Stiftung Inna Przestrzeń [Other Space] (Poland); BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts Brussels (Belgium); Associated Partners are: Africa Museum (Belgium), Afro Rainbow Austria [ARA], Queer Base, Vienna, Silent University in Austria and Students of the Post-Conceptual Art Practices Studio [PCAP] at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Concept: Marissa Lobo, Galina Baeva (kulturen in bewegung), Henrie Dennis (ARA), Marina Gržinić (Prof. in charge of PCAP at AkBild Wien); Silent University in Austria (Helmut Ege, Birgit Waltenberger in collaboration with Versatorium, WIESE), Queer Base (Faris Cuchi Gezahegn).