Projects

Region 2023

Allgemein

Stops*Addresses

The region along the Summerauerbahn
The action area of the 2023 festival is the region along the Summerauerbahn. From the city of Linz, through the Mühlviertel region across the border to the Czech Republic towards České Budějovice and onwards … A meandering route as a connecting element between city and countryside.

FdR Region 2023
FdR Region 2023

Overview

The region along the Summerauerbahn

Research on the region (extract)

 

The route as a metaphor The railway line, representing a region, is a metaphor for a number of challenges in the 2023 edition of the festival. From public and individual transport, the use of resources to the boundaries in people’s minds. A metaphor for crossing, shaping and moulding landscape and society. For overcoming distances. For places of encounter and dialogue between regions, cultures and generations. For setting out and leaving behind. For staying and moving on. For transitions. For deceleration. For stopping and travelling on. For something that belongs to everyone. And affects everyone. For a shared resource.

The view from the train window If you look out of the train window, you pass through a landscape that changes from station to station. From the main station in Linz to the first stop in Franckviertel, squeezed between the industrial harbour, the main road and the voestalpine site. An unadorned entry and exit point for commuters. Continue over the old Danube bridge to Steyregg and Pulgarn. The suburbs of Linz. As far as St. Georgen a.d. Gusen, increasingly densely built-up residential and commercial areas to the left and right. The conurbation, fuelled by the expansion of motorways, main roads and motorways, is expanding in all directions. There has long been a counter-movement to the rural exodus. Traffic jams are building up on the roads. There would be enough space in the Summerauerbahn! After St. Georgen, the narrow Gusental valley to Lungitz. Undeveloped nature. Then the wide plains, meadows and fields as far as Katsdorf, Wartberg and Schloss-Haus – with railway stations and stops on the outskirts or far away from the villages. From Pregarten, via Kefermarkt an der Feldaist to Lasberg. After about an hour’s journey: the railway station in Freistadt, a 45-minute walk from the town. Rumour has it that the Freistadt carriage owners prevented a better connection 150 years ago. Finally Summerau and the view across the border to Horní Dvořiště in the Czech Republic.

Region with a special cultural density The Mühlviertel and the region along the Summerauerbahn in particular is an area with numerous cultural initiatives. Some of them have more than 30 years of history (Local-Bühne Freistadt, Heimatfilmfestival Freistadt). Associations that have built up structures, venues, networks and audiences with great commitment. But there are also tender and promising seedlings in the cultural landscape that are still in the making. This special cultural density is the humus for a festival that once again focuses more on regional participation and sees itself as a source of inspiration. Or as the founding generation of the festival put it 30 years ago: A festival not as a “showcase of the existing”, but as an opportunity to leap over the local, already familiar shadow and as an impetus for something new.

Regional integration The Festival of Regions is one of the most renowned contemporary art festivals. For 30 years, the festival has explored and conquered a region in Upper Austria on a biennial basis. In addition to the programmatic approach of enabling contemporary, critical and sometimes subversive art outside the cultural centres in the regions, the focus is on strengthening and promoting regional initiatives and the participation of local people in and in artistic processes and projects. The festival is happy to act as a mediator for the submitters.

For this festival edition, we particularly wanted to invite initiatives, associations, activists and artists from the focus region to get involved with project proposals and ideas. Regional initiatives that do not want to realise their own projects but are interested in exchanging ideas and collaborating with artists and the festival can contact the festival team.

Participating municipalities

Research about the region

Nothing special! by Andi Wahl (author, cultural worker and historian from Windhaag near Freistadt)

No, there is no specific characteristic of the Mühlviertel population. No “national character”. Nothing that distinguishes this “type of people” from all others.

Those times – if they ever existed – are over. Globalisation, the urbanisation of rural areas, the education offensive of the 1980s, or whoever you want to blame for it, have done a great job. The current area of the Festival of Regions 2023 is also part of the “unification of the world”, as the Islamic scholar Thomas Bauer titles a booklet he has written (Reclam Universal-Bibliothek No. 19492). In it, he laments “the loss of ambiguity and diversity” in the world. A clever and amusing book to read. Nevertheless, I would (also) like to disagree with Bauer.

Something that I notice time and time again are imprints that result from people’s respective life situations. These are certainly not genuinely Mühlviertel influences. But they are imprints that result from the availability or non-availability of life opportunities, cultural and educational programmes or job opportunities. People in the countryside are used to having to create many things for themselves and make more of an effort than people in the centres. Long commutes to work, fewer educational opportunities, holidays or weekends full of work are a matter of course for them. Naturally, because it affects everyone in the town, village or small city. That’s why they don’t complain. Life means creating, getting stuck in and making an effort. And they are good at that. If you get involved with these people, you can’t be a phoney or a chatterbox. You can only win their respect and affection if you know how to tackle things yourself and keep your promises to the letter. There’s no time for waffle and vanity here. But if you can get them excited about your own cause, then you have reliable and competent people at your side who are willing to invest some of their life energy in a joint endeavour.

But you don’t get this privilege for free. You have to earn it.

Bitter Utopia by Michael Eibl (cultural worker at the Local-Bühne Freistadt)

Created around 150 years ago to connect the regional economic centres of Linz and České Budějovice, it was probably never the intention of today’s “Summerauerbahn” to connect the north-eastern Mühlviertel to the Upper Austrian central region. The fact that hardly any places along the Summerauerbahn are actually connected to the railway line with a station directly in the town, as well as the route, probably corresponds to this originally non-existent claim. Nevertheless, the “Summerauerbahn” is suitable for identification: what those living along its route have in common is that although the railway is somewhere nearby, it is hardly useful in everyday life. Motorway & motorway dominate as routes. The realisation that 150-year-old transport infrastructures do not (or cannot) meet the changing and evolving demands of mobility is obvious.

In this case, the railway line as a connecting element between the central region and the province remains a bitter utopia – bitter because it is tangible. The tracks have been laid, the stations built, the timetables written. And the trains are running. But sometimes into and through and for nothing.