Andreas Wahl:
“Each project involves going to one’s personal limits. In this case, the limits were physical, social and those between art and politics. This was positive, for during this project we were also able to demonstrate that as is often the case, crossing frontiers opens the way to new perspectives and understanding. It moved something inside all of us and with the experience and knowledge thus gained, we can reflect on a successful project.”

“I’m glad that it’s over…”
~~~

Rainer Zendron, Umpire of The Festival of the Regions

“Like no other cultural event, the Festival of the Regions combines contemporary art with the regional conditions and traditions in order to introduce under-represented forms of art to a wider public outside the few urban centres of the province. Within the framework of this festival, we tried with special accuracy to discuss social experiences and events. This year’s theme in the Festival of the Regions, was dedicated to “the art of enmity”. The intense human relationship that is seen in the impression of the war on Iraq drew the strongest interest of artists and audience. As a contemporary cultural event, the thematic inherent field of tension in this year’s festival could not have, nor should not have, exclusively found its expression in a symbolically tranquil form. Furthermore, the objective was to deliver incentives which make the contradictions themselves dance. It was especially the provocative and controversial nature of this theme that encouraged the public in great numbers to explore the individual projects and to participate in the discussion about enmity.

Even if apparent enmities often appear to be banished off the surface in our prosperous country, a wide, disregarded field of concrete moulds of suppressed conflicts still spreads. Learned discourses cannot break and correct such encrusted and unadmitted atmospheres and feelings, but only an open view on the microcosm and its following recontextualization in the social whole can show lasting effects and change atmospheres.

The conflict area, picked out as a special theme by v.o.n. karawane, presented itself to trying out such corrections in the emotional field by dedicating itself through the encounters and concrete experiences with the different, the unknown, to the always anew developing myths of the community;—through facing at eye-level the relevant feelings, instead of lecturing in an admonishing way.
The conflicts between poor and rich, conventional and the nonconventional, native soil and camel droppings, and acceleration and deceleration were reflected in its various manifestations. Rites and conventions of our individual and collective coping were examined in an exemplary way, yet not without the mediating of interventions and discussions.”