Step 1: The Problem

Not through our living on the home-soil, not through our daily contact in trade and commerce, but rather through a spiritual attachment are we bund in a community. […] We meet each other in a language, which is something completely different from a mere natural instrument of understanding; for in it the past speaks to us, some forces act upon us and become immediately powerful, forces, to which political institutions aren’t able to attribute a space, nor to impose any limit, a particular relationship is in force, […] behind it, we forebode something ruling, that we dare to name the Spirit of the Nation.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

A smartphone-based training-program for mobile-integration in Austria.

Immigration doesn’t simply end there, where the migrant enters the Austrian soil and then decide to stay here. A long migration through a language, a culture and a community still awaits him. This spiritual immigration is what we call mobility within the symbolic space of the Nation.


In short (Kurz): Mobile Integration!
The issue of integration glaringly stays out-of-reach of politicians and authorities alones. Therefore, also the art-world and the scientific community are called on to help coping with the challenges of our time by actively supporting the governmental action (Mitwirkungspflicht! = duty to co-operate!).

In June 2011, with the aim of developing mobile integration devices through the use of new communication technologies, the A-IKF has started the interdisciplinary research-project Homo Sacher.

Homo Sacher presents itself as a useful training-tool for mobile integration of smart-immigrants. Due to the particular migrant-friendly usability of virtual environments, mobile technologies present the advantage of playfully conveying exemplar models for an adequate behaviour here in Austria without generating the resistance that usually accompanies the migrant’s integration process. Technologies, in this case, act in favour of the improvement of one’s integration-rating, through which migrants in Austria can position themselves according to their “performance” (Leistung).


Step 1: The Problem

In order to launch the Homo Sacher App, the problem of integration will be reformulated in the frame of Coded Cultures 2011 – The City as Interface, through the presentation of an artistic promotion-trailer. The very object of the commercial will be the representation of the devastating consequences of a failed integration experience in Austria. As literary base for the trailer, the interdisciplinary workgroup decided to work on a short prose of a Dutch writer, whose integration process in the so-called “Land der Berge” (“land of the mountains”, i.e. Austria) was anything but frictionless: Thomas Bernhard.


„[...] he came to the city in order to get to know people, but until now he did not manage to find even one person. He had deployed different means to gain the trust of the people. But he repelled them. They even let him finish talking, and also listen to him attentively, but the did not want to understand him. [...] He also transmuted in order to approach them; he was sometimes one person and sometimes another, and he was quite successful in his dissimulation, but even in this way he could not bind with anybody. [...] Now the young man runs in his room and tucks himself up “

Thomas Bernhard


ARTPHILEIN – Institut für Kunstforschung (A-IKF) A-IKF is an in(ter)disciplinary research institute, whose activity is driven by the experimentation of integrative forms of scientific and artistic research, as well as by long-term-applied, relevant focuses of humanities and cultural studies. The actual thematic focus Language and Violence – with special attention to mediatic forms of symbolic violence – brings with it the traces of the project The Violated Body – «Subject» to/of Violence, which took place in Turin, in June 2010.

Links:
http://www.artphilein-ikf.org/deutsch/projekte/homo-sacher/


Concept and Realization

A-IKF (Santiago Cazorla, Luca De Pietri, Giorgio Palma)
Radmila Tasic