Keep it realistic. Dream on!
Dominika Meindl
This text
1. does without a complete list of current crises, because anyone who has it mostly together is more than informed about this clusterfuck;
2. does without the expected bourgeois-educated Freud quotes just because it’s about dreaming;
3. on “flagship project of Upper Austria as a cultural location” or “exploring new cultural-political narratives and locating anti-heteronormative practices” (although there is nothing to be said against them in terms of content) and
4. on Hitler, just because it’s about Braunau (well, almost, read for yourself).
Dreaming realistically? Paradoxical. And for that very reason, a motto that perfectly fits the times. A dream is a hallucinatory experience, a mixture of mental digestion and exercise. From here, there is a direct path to art. But, but.
The dream of reason also gives birth to monsters. The cult of reason of the Enlightenment has a terrible dark side. Because man is afraid of the threatening nature, he persuades himself that his reason gives him a mandate to rule. In an unholy alliance with the patriarchal religions, this repeatedly turns into violence against the inferior, the less fortunate. The path from an alert mind to barbarism is therefore very short (Pol Pot, for example, was a fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau).
Humans are not even the only animal that dreams. We know that dogs dream-walk. Octopuses change color in a flash during sleep, and their dreams can be read on their skin, which, cue “barbarism,” does not stop us from frying their tentacles with garlic. For a few years now, artificial networks have apparently also been dreaming. The software DeepDream creates images that resemble LSD hallucinations.
At least humans are the only animals that throw parties, which brings us to our topic (thank you for your patience!). For the first time in its history, the Festival of Regions (FdR) is making the Innviertel region its center. Braunau is not only a just choice, but also a clever one. It is situated on a river, on a border, it is a typical Austrian small town, it is pretty and it forms a ‘middle center’, as economic geography so nicely puts it. Whether Bavaria, Habsburgs, Austria – Braunau was always as far away as possible from the changing centers of power. And that has left its mark, for better or for worse. One cannot deny the stubbornness of the Innviertlers.
What makes Braunau tick? What does a region dream of? Of an alternative history? As in Hannes Stein’s novel “The Comet”, in which the world is threatened with destruction by a comet, but at least Stalin and Hitler never made it out of their regions of Innerkartlien and Innviertel, because the First and Second World Wars never happened. Braunau would be a pretty, sleepy town on the Inn, and in Salzburg’s suburb 15 there would be a pizzeria or a bookshop or a shop for stupid pictures that you can hang in your office: “Don’t dream your life, live your dream!” Or there would be a party headquarters for a political group that dreams of a common state for all German speakers, but hardly anyone votes for them because that would not only be unrealistic but inhumane.
Children and fools are dismissed with “dream on!” Those who dream of a just and united society are labeled “naive!” by those who are all too reasonable. But how naive is it to derive a “should” from an “is”? What a nightmare, what a dangerous waking dream, to consider the circumstances and developments as good or even God-given!
In Braunau, too, the FdR’s goal since 1993 should, will and must be achieved: no art without people, no people without art. It sounds simple, but it is a challenge with every new edition. The location is never a developing area whose “natives” have to be forced to deal with elitist art fuss. Such colonial thinking would arise from the sleep of reason. Ideally, the “Dåsigen” and the guests will be involved in an intensive exchange for ten days. This is a dream that the FdR reliably creates every two years.
Incidentally, this author is a lousy dreamer. The reality of sleep does not bring her a reunion with beloved deceased, but rather a charred computer the day after the deadline, so this text here is destroyed, and where are my pants by the way? So it’s better to daydream about matriarchy and the introduction of an upper limit for the existence of millionaires. Or the disempowerment of the algorithm villains. A tenfold increase in spending on art, culture, education, care. You could say I am dreamer, but I’m not the only one.