Drafts

First of all, a window that you can’t look through, framed as though a canvas. Accumulating off screen in an independent narration are previously conducted interviews, reports about the local community, and handed-down myths and legends. The narrative lies over the associatively-montaged visual level as though radiating from an imaginary cinema projector: over static provincial still lives, building models, sketches, historical footage, and everyday observations from Vordernberg.

In the past, exploitation of the Erzberg brought jobs to the Styrian community; today, hope rests on the planned detention center for asylum seekers—an EU model project announced as an architectural competition under the banner of human dignity and recent regional economic reinvigoration. The building is meant to reexamine the theme of immigration, which means, its structural arrangement should ensure the most pronounced scope for action of those interned; it should change society.

In addition, images of (architectural) designs for a building are superimposed over designs for a society. Ambivalent perspectives collide with security, freedom, as well as being constrained/ stopped. In doing so, Juri Schaden refutes the implicit logic of detention: he leaves the sovereignty with the beholder and provides sufficient space to sound out one’s own position on the theme at hand. In keeping with the title, this is not mediated as a single, linear, and unalterable narrative, but instead, as a consistently fraying essayistic draft: about the transformation of post-industrial social and working life; about coming and going, whether of a voluntary or state-ordained—at times violent—nature; about supposed fact, which with Schaden, generally presents itself as something that can be seen as potentially fictional.
(Sebastian Höglinger)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt