Days of Open Performance Graz presents a one day public event as big happening with performances, actions in public space, open readings, community based work and many more. The happening will take place in Stadtpark, Graz in organization with international festival program DOPUST/Days of Open Performance Graz, Forum Stadtpark and IZK Institute for Contemporary Art/Institut für Zeitgenösische Kunst of TU Graz. Considering the public space as territory for communication artists will interact with people at different locations, creating situations and investigating reactions. In the context of the present time artists will react on social structure and current events in Austria regarding the political situations, class differences and people status.
Applying their framework within the territory of the Stadtpark and close surroundings, participants will deal with the memory archive, artefact preservation, social plastic, cultural heritage, storytelling and creation of situations in form of flash mob, human microphone and time based performance. Actions will be conducted on the model of situationism and other radical emancipatory movements from the mid-20th century. One vital example is the political art group Situationist International. Their approach is a cultural critique such as society of spectacle and anti-authoritarian positions that have found its intellectual foundations from Dada and Surrealism. The concept and the idea of situationism is present in the work of groups such as Art and Language, Voina, Pussy Riot and peoples' movements and protests such as Occupy Wall Street. In this way we can consider a merging of art and activism with an ideological background that we can find in revolutionary ideas from the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Also if we consider the intellectual influence of situationism in music from the late 1970s and 80s and the creation of punk with the anti society statement - in your face - we will point to Malcolm McLaren and the creation of Sex Pistols as well as the anarcho-art commune band Crass.
Participants: Students of the Architecture Faculty at the Graz University of Technology in the framework of the course Live Action: Creating Roles in Speculative Environments at the IZK Institute for Contemporary Art with the course leader, artist and (chair) professor at IZK Milica Tomic as well as performance moderator Marko Markovic.
