A war in the distance

Abstract

"Useful disruption and productive conflict have always been part of steirischer herbst—an institution that has sparked dialogue time and again throughout its history. Every autumn since its founding half a century ago, the festival has provided a platform for new productions, provoking and shaping public debates in a variety of forms across disciplines and media. Reinventing itself many times over, steirischer herbst has always redefined the terms of the conversation about what culture might mean in a changing contemporaneity, as seen in Graz, Austria’s second most populous city. [...] From its very beginnings, steirischer herbst stood out as one of the world’s few interdisciplinary art festivals, long before the fashionable overuse of the term. Fostering dialogue between the arts by combining aesthetic positions with theoretical reflection, the festival’s various iterations have integrated visual art, music, art in public space, theater, performance, new media, literature, and everything in between, with an emphasis on one field or the other varying over the years. This point remains central to the festival’s approach today, as it emphasizes work that refuses to be bound by the rules and traditional scope of separate cultural fields."-- Website steirischer herbst.