Working Class Ecologies, 2022

www.wienwoche.org

16-25 September 2022

Artistic Director : Jelena Micić
Executive Director: Nataša Mackuljak
Festival Curator: Deniz Güvensoy

Everyday use of plastic products, non-sustainable clothing, and a diet, based on cheap imported food is an inevitable reality for many. The preferences of the ones with the lower income are shaped by a set of conditions such as a restrictive labor market, educational discrimination, and systematic oppression based on income, citizenship, race, gender, and ability. The struggle to survive and sustain the life of others and oneself is becoming a serious task in times of health and energy supply insecurity, as well as food supply shortage. Although the effects of the crisis are proportional to the position in the social hierarchy, all the lives on the planet are being affected more or less drastically.

The recent pandemic supported further precarisation of the working people, many of which risked their own health by taking on essential and irreplaceable tasks within the service and healthcare sector. When we witnessed deer, boars, and dolphins taking over the urban space, there was an illusion of the positive effects of the lockdown. However, hyper-digitalization of the workforce produced the same amount of carbon emissions as air transportation. On the other hand, ongoing wars and military conflicts in and out of Europe reintroduced dystopia and revealed inequalities between displaced people based on origin and nationality. While the fossil-fuel industry governs the unequal distribution of resources, the military-industrial complex creates its own economy at the expense of the energy and life force of those who have no choice but to produce.

The 11th edition of the WIENWOCHE gathers transdisciplinary teams of artists, cultural workers, art educators, curators, and activists to tackle a variety of issues related to their lived experiences. We will see socially engaged fashion from Zrenjanin, Serbia, a town with no drinking tap water, learn about the right to adequate housing, the common grief of lost buildings in Vienna and a mining town in Sweden, the criminalization and food-related exoticization of the second generation of Asian guest-workers as well as the invisible and underpaid labor of Central and South-Eastern European female care workers. While the project will deal with the destructive conditions of the fast fashion industry and the transformation from linear to circular models of production, in other the focus will be on the house/home as a concept that connects economy and ecology, support anticolonial intervention of racialized bodies onto the historical sites of Vienna. Another aspect we will look at is the corrupted power relations in global agriculture affecting indigenous realities, social inequalities in the cycle of food consumption-production, interconnection of scientific and poetic interpretations of ecosystems.

During a workshop, we will use stitching as a form of solidarity against patriarchal and heteronormative stereotypes. During the pandemic, a glimpse of collective momentary solidarity emerged and was once more actualized through the invasion, even though in a selective and unequal way. Both humans and more- than-human suffer from the expansionist and exhaustive character of Capitalism’s vicious circle. The festival tends to offer a platform for public discussion in a form of collaborative, decentralized, universalist, intersectional, transnational, and intergenerational models, modes, and visions of peaceful coexistence. How do we acknowledge the neglected and invisible and empower the common revolutionary struggle to survive on the planet? How do we create an environment of appreciation and a non-biased exchange?

Deniz Güvensoy und Jelena Micić

Befreiende Evas // Doing the Dirty Work

Feminist Cross Stitch Club // Fences, Insects, Embroideries (materialcommunities)

How Many Layers? // Immo Grief

Nosotras por/para nosotras // Oikos: ‘The House’

The Last Inventory // Feeling of a Dumpling

agri_culture // Symbiopoesis // Torbalon

Collaborations:

Basis Wien // Vienna Design Week // Depot: Discussion Program