Odd Jubilees, 2. Act

Press Information
Thursday, 4 June 2009

It is the obscure jubilees rather than the obvious ones that make the most effective vehicles for bizarre stories, and traditional celebrations stand to gain a great deal from performances, installations and sculptures.

Let’s go ski-jumping on Pöstlingberg! Let’s commemorate the coldest day of the last century and combine this with a dinner invitation! We will also be thinking of the early days of electrical street lamps and admiring the reproduction of the northern lights, which was misinterpreted as an enemy attack back in 1938. We will be admiring a dancing horse in the Cowboy Museum and Linz’s flottilla of oceangoing ships and we will be evoking the mise-en-scène of the blasting of highrise buildings on the Hart Plateau as a “show”. We will be gleaning the day’s news from a paper written in Johann Puchner’s global language, listening on “Robinson islands” in the Hauptplatz to Georg Peyer’s odyssey and marvelling at the Indian elephant that made its way across Linz somewhere around 1500. Finally we will be riding our bicycle indoors, as was usual 142 years ago in Linz’s velodrome; we will be asking about the origins of Goethekreuzung and indulging in aesthetic delights. Let yourself in for a series of surprising turns and twists in Linz’s “other” history.

WHAT // CELEBRATIONS, PERFORMANCES, INSTALLATIONS, ADDRESSES, READINGS...
WHEN // 14 February 09, 7 June 09, 19 July 09, 20 September 09