Open Call 2025

WIENWOCHE 2025: „Breathe again”

Deadline: Friday, December 13, 2024
Selected projects within WIENWOCHE 2025 will take place September 12-21, 2025.

What prevents you from living an unchained life on this planet? 

The force of the people is trapped in the claws of imperialism. By inventing, enforcing and legitimizing the entitlement to conquer and exploit, imperialism exhausts the energy of the people and nature, atomizing the disenfranchised. The rule of violence anchors exploitation and the privatization of the common.

Public interest is privatized and directed against the contributing society. There can be no trust in political participation when domination hides behind representation. Imperialism masks itself as benevolent dreams-come-true. The monopoly of knowing and the annexation of resistant infrastructures burns alternatives to ashes, leaving the wounded to breathe through the smoke.

Growing from ashes, the liberating world pulsates with defiance, steadily cracking imperial ramparts. Multiple cracks come together, unified into collective unruliness. Break the chains!

Historical phantasies and daily racisms

The everyday imperial mindset of the Austrian governing society even creeps into the (national)progressive spectrum. Patrimony feels safe, cozy and sweet, especially when coated in silencing and erasure. The superiority of the oblivious allies is normalized and entrenched in structural hegemony, the colonial past of the majority forgotten. Nostalgia for the harmonious supra-national, multi-cultural inner colonizing Danube Monarchy and self-congratulating guilt culture. The heart of Western-centric whiteness. Nurturing death and necro-obsessions.

The mendacious warmth of culture

In which languages do you express your realities and dreams? Cultivation and civilizing missions continue. Conquering the world with Austrian culture might seem like a witty slogan for empowering national self-worth, but it imposes instrumentalisation of culture as the mechanism of governance. Imposing an unquestioned although ultimate worldview, the ever-actual populist  united in diversity motto prevails to fuel domination over the collective body of resistances.

Beneath gilded facades lay skeletal remains. Institutions keep earning from colonial and fascist looting while the already stable-funded institutions commodify diversity to sustain a false sense of equal access. Cabinets of curiosity are saleable, still the liberated world is not profitable.

When not intentionally erased, migrant and diasporic cultures are appropriated only to demand their constant reinvention. The logic of the neo-liberal diversity-show is an insulting way of extracting skills and knowledge from already multiply burdened precarious positions. Such classist and racialized actions administer narratives of obedience, self-colonization and -censorship.

Green transition is green colonialism

The extractivist rule comes with planetary consequences. Colonial taxes, low mineral rents and free zone-tax benefits are masked as strategic partnerships in the name of the self-imposed green transition.

The argument of the geographically disadvantaged European Union internal market is a blunt excuse to perpetuate the legacy of raw materials exploration and extraction from the so-called third countries or overseas countries or territories. The good-faith neo-imperialism should strengthen the security of EU supply by imposing extraction in the public interest centered on the well-being of its citizens.

The cost of freedom

How to remain radically honest while being existentially dependent? How to sustain collective bodies of resistance when one is forced to understand and present oneself as subordinate or well-digestible in order to survive in the system? Collective counter-hegemonic memory navigates between resistance and complicity, fostering radical imaginations.

How do we not end up in hegemonic compliance mirroring the same old oppressive patterns we inherited? Which historical, social and environmental inequalities could we unmask without proposing the imposed models of system-critique? Colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism are to be transformed by (ever)establishing infrastructures of remembrance and respect.

The global organization of the dispossessed endures in the form of transnational companionships and historical solidarities. It is never too early to seize the anti-extractivist struggle for land as the global common! Socio-ecological struggle is a driving force of revolutionary change!

Vibrant and sustainable infrastructures of resistances will not rest.
Until we breathe.
Again.

Hard Facts

Deadline: Friday, December 13, 2024
Selected projects within WIENWOCHE 2025 will take place September 12-21, 2025.

Please send us

• Description of the project (2 pages max.)
• Profiles/CVs of the participants and roles in the team
• Information on the venues and spaces you might already have in mind for your projects
• Mention of the target groups and communities you are addressing and how you intend to reach them with your project
• Calculations (Please fill in the form BUDGET)
• Visual material
• Languages: German, English (If you want to send your application in other languages, please write to us beforehand). Our team also speaks BKS, Spanish, and Swedish.

What we are looking for

• Hybrid formats between political action and artistic work, discourse and knowledge production
• Activist/artist/artivist collaborations; co-operations between different initiatives/action groups; transdisciplinary (artistic) research teams 
• Community projects; Respectful, caring and participatory exchange with local communities
• Projects with the potential of creating infrastructures relevant for the communities
• Projects in non-institutional, off- and alternative spaces, public spaces, project challenging institutional presentations
• Projects based on specific sites of historical and cultural importance in Vienna
• Projects respecting and building further from the legacies of fellow-initiatives

WHO CAN APPLY

• Collectives, action groups and collaborating individuals
• People of all genders, social groups and backgrounds living and working in Vienna

APPLICATION MODE

• Projects with a budget between 15.000 and 20.000 EUR

If you send us a proposal with a smaller sum than proposed, the curators might suggest merging with another project. In this sense, it might be better that you look for collaborators before sending the proposal.

OUR MODE OF WORK

• WIENWOCHE is a framework with proposed deadlines and requirements.
• Projects respect the deadlines suggested by the festival team.
• There will be 3 meetings with all selected projects and the WIENWOCHE team. Individual meetings will be possible depending on the needs and the clarity of the project 
• Artistic director and co-curator of WIENWOCHE work and exchange with the projects on the concept, budget, formats and locations. Projects are open for suggestions, discussions and further collaborations.
• Projects are open for festival schedule date suggestions and the proposed number of events by the artistic director and the curator.
• Projects will assign their own conceptual/editorial, press/social media, production and finances team and include their names in the budget proposal.
• Projects will promote their events and come to all exchange and public festival programs
• WIENWOCHE will host ecologically sustainable events and we kindly ask you to check the criteria on the following website: https://www.oekoevent.at/.

OPEN CALL INFO MEETING

Open Online-Info-Meeting on the open call „Breathe again“ / WIENWOCHE 2025

Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 4 – 6 pm

Zoom Meeting: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87536926076?pwd=3zbbTwgANmuKRd7P9GZJI5HvyaN1b2.1

Meeting-ID: 875 3692 6076 | access code: 271113

SELECTION PROCESS

• The projects are selected by a jury (3 external members, artistic director/co-curator and the board).
• The information on the public jury meeting will be shared with all the applicants and the event is concentrated on potentially interesting projects for the festival.
• After the preselection, WIENWOCHE team will conduct interviews with potentially interesting projects.

PUBLIC JURY MEETING

Jan 28, 2025 04:00 PM Vienna

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83695287495?pwd=XwJu9JId7XZ6muOpDfPrpKTFWUldcg.1

Meeting-ID: 836 9528 7495

Passcode: 898792

ADVISORY BOARD

Daniel Romuald Bitouh holds a doctorate in literature and cultural studies, and is a lecturer in African literature and a German and French teacher. Since 2014, he has been the director of AFRIEUROTEXT as well as the founder and director of the AFRIEUROTEXT bookshop. He is the author of the monograph ‘Ästhetik der Marginalität im Werk von Joseph Roth. A postcolonial view of the entanglement of internal and external colonialism’. He was also responsible for the conception and realisation of the annual Kitong Kiass symposium series. He is also the founder of a vocational training school for young men and women in Yaoundé, Cameroon which opened in 2020.

Christine Braunersreuther has, after training as a chemical laboratory assistant and working as a local and cultural journalist, studied museum studies at the FHTW Berlin and museum education at the Ruhr University Bochum and is currently doing her doctorate on 'Possibilities of (re)presenting transnational care work' at the Laboratory for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology at the University of Göttingen. She works as a curator, journalist, lecturer for exhibition theory and as a secondary school teacher for art and design.

Zoraida Nieto, born in Caracas, Venezuela, is a cultural and social anthropologist, media artist and feminist political activist. She has conducted numerous field studies in Venezuela from 1997 to 2024. Her research focuses on gender studies in the areas of sexual and reproductive rights, violence against women and girls, division of labour and human rights. In addition, she continues her research on matriarchal ideologies and poverty reduction. She is currently working on topics such as the autocratic developments in Venezuela, machismo and cultures of poverty as well as mother-centred, domestic family and social structures in the Caribbean.

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