Realistic dreams – “Gedächnisluckn”

by Isa Schieche

I remember the taste of pickled herring in my mouth very clearly. The Festival of Regions (FdR) came to my town with a satellite performance when I was in first grade at elementary school. They were looking for participants. My mother, bold as she is, volunteered for a performance by Lothar Kreutzer and Peter Baer. Everyone had brought an armchair and the herring and a dumpling were handed out. Then the adults spread out on a hilly meadow in the afternoon sun with their armchairs, dumplings and herring and took a seat on their armchairs. They ate their dumplings and/or herring while a huge fire engine drove around them and splashed them. If my memory serves me right, it was something like that. When I asked what this action was about, my mother had no answer and said I would have to ask the artist. I didn’t have the courage to ask him at the time and I was satisfied with the explanation that the adults were all running around “soaking wet” and there was a lot of screaming and laughing. So that’s art, I thought to myself, bringing people together, letting them do things that would otherwise be impossible and making them happy in the process.

What a twist of fate and what a privilege that I am now here in charge of describing what this year’s festival edition is all about.

Through this memory and how I answered my own questions at the time, I realize that growing up in the Innviertel has given me something pragmatic and down-to-earth. I associate the region and its inhabitants with solution-oriented thinking and action. As the FdR is actually coming to the Innviertel for the first time without being a satellite of another region, there is a wealth of realistic strategies to discover as to how the people of the Innviertel know how to implement their ideas. 

The festival can therefore be seen as a playing field on which dreams and utopias are tested for their feasibility and durability.

With the theme “Realistic Dreams”, we set out together in search of inclusive possibilities for community. In doing so, the festival is enlisting the support of various groups and individuals from the region who have special knowledge and community-building experience. Here I would like to present a small selection of the projects in which visitors to the festival and local residents can participate in Braunau in June:

For example, there is the Hinterfotzing colliery, a community based on tradition and collective experience. 

Collieries in the Innviertel region have nothing to do with a mine, but are drinking, feasting, singing and dancing societies in which paying the “bill” at the end of the night is the name of the game. Historically, only men could be members of a colliery. Not so with the Hinterfotzing colliery, which is aimed at FINTA (Women, Intersex, Nonbinary, Trans and Agender) people from the region and visitors. As a decoration, “Zechburscha” are also allowed at the socials, as long as they distinguish themselves through their singing or dancing skills. The appropriation and reinterpretation of traditions, which by their very nature have always been subject to change and discourse in order to remain attractive and contemporary, opens up a space for unifying gatherings and subversive feminist festivities. All FINTA people are welcome to join in the Zechen activities, take part in the workshop, text songs, dance Landler or attend a “Ziaga”, which can be a walk across the bridge from Braunau to Simbach.

For most people, the Inn Bridge in Braunau is just a bridge on the way to the next pub, for others it is a border. On the banks of the Inn, not far from the bridge, there will be a reading at the “Banquet at the Banquet”, which offers a platform to various writers who share an experience of fleeing to Austria or Germany. New texts by Hamed Abboud, Rasha Abbas, Pooyan Moghaddassi, Widad Nabi, Asiyeh Panahi and a text by Jad Turjman (1989-2022) will appear in a multilingual publication edited by Lisa Bolyos and Natalie Deewan. The German-speaking cultural scene benefits immensely from the exchange with newcomers, once again at the readings, when the newcomers share what has become of their wishes and dreams 10 years after the “Summer of Migration”. As utopian as it may sound, migrants are demonized to an unprecedented extent in the prevailing political discourse. It is absolutely necessary and revealing to listen carefully to those who are or were newcomers.

The first time I saw a procession of golden hoods as a child, I was both intimidated and fascinated. The garb and the glittering headdress with its extravagant shape seemed strange to me in a futuristic way, but also appealingly beautiful. Years later, when I saw “Dune” and the Bene-Gesserit characters in the movies, I had very strong flashbacks to my feelings when I first saw the gold hoods. Like the Bene-Gesserit, the Goldhauben women’s community thinks about care work and community beyond the boundaries of its members.

And the Goldhauben have always asked themselves questions about the compatibility of the old and the new. During the festival, the artists Rosanna Graf and Lisa Alice Klosterkötter will work together with the Braunauer Goldhauben on a vision of the future that builds on the cross-generational knowledge of a traditional women’s association. What can we learn from the Goldhauben in the light that membership in the group leads to applied and far-reaching acts of solidarity, care work, social commitment and friendship and not to exclusion and isolation from the outside world, as is often the case with other communities? 

It is well known that people come together to eat dumplings. But when pubs “die”, places that have important social functions as well as food disappear. In June, two projects invite visitors to ponder wonderfully complex questions and reflections on community and food traditions through table and cooking groups, such as “Exotische Provinz Frühschoppen” by Alex de las Heras and Paul Peters and “Landschaft kochen” by Franziska Schink. Visitors are invited to indulge in hearty experiments. Regional ingredients are frothed up and sausaged for an exchange on justice, tradition, globalization and the question of sustainability. It is quite conceivable that a realistically shrewd Innviertler will think of how to persuade politicians to actually take action against the ever-widening income gap and tax wealth accordingly while enjoying a “healing chicken soup”.

According to research, the performance mentioned at the beginning was called the “sedentariness test”. My mother had passed the test at the time and I had obviously failed because she had eaten the dumpling and I had eaten the herring, which she had disgustedly made disappear in the pocket of her raincoat and then given to me. The content of the performance was a test of belonging under the motto: What the farmer doesn’t know, he won’t eat.

Accordingly, I am looking forward to a controversial festival. One that takes us in, wants a lot and tries a lot. An edition of the Festival of the Regions, in which not only contemplation but also participation across all age groups is possible. One that drives out the “Tramhappade” and the “Gedächtnisluckn” and sends us off into the Innviertel summer with a range of possibilities for action in the form of tools, collective experiences and enriching friendships.