PERFORMING PRIMAL COMMUNISM – A REENACTMENT PROJECT

Wider Research Context Performing Primal Communism works on an arts-based research perspective on the AAO Commune, founded in 1972 by the actionist artist Otto Mühl and dissolved in 1990. The Commune was devoted to a breakdown of established social habits and beliefs (see: Janov, Reich). Its declared aim was to overcome authoritarian institutions like the state, church, bourgeois family, capitalism and patriarchy with the help of science and art. But the social experiment ended in a highly authoritarian leader system within a gated community. Mühl was convicted of widespread sexual abuse and sentenced to 7 years in prison. Together with former communards the project seeks for a revisiting, remapping and recontextualizing of the Commune via research in and through the arts (Borgdorff 2006) in building a research setting for the reenactment (Rau 2014) of shared AAO history: (Re)writing of Reality through (Re)enactment. Primary Researchers Involved Paul-Julien Robert, artist, child of the former AAO commune, author of the documentary movie project Meine keine Familie / My Fathers, my Mother & Me. Thomas Marschall, social anthropologist, Exhibition curator. Elisabeth Schäfer, philosopher, expert in gender issues. Ida Clay, author, artist The applicants work closely together with the Austrian Museum of Folk Life & Folk Art.

The research team of the PEEK project on the critical repraisal of the history of the so called "Mühl-Commune" at Friedrichshof/Burgenland in Austria is a group of second-generation scholars and communards as well as externs, who are established in the artistic-cultural field as filmmakers, authors, performers, and museum mediators. With their knowledge as contemporary witnesses and research in alternative archives of the "Commune", whose accessibility has so far been personalized (and thus limited), they pursue research approaches for the re-visioning of Mühl's work. These include negotiation processes with museums and gallery owners, discussion formats and dialogue offerings to the generation of "Commune" founders, and scholarly conferences. Standing outside public institutions and marginalized by actors in the art market, they thus represent an activist position. This is especially true for the group MATHILDA (see online: https://aboutmathilda.com/), established within the PEEK project. The group emerged in 2019 with interventions in the exhibition spaces at Friedrichshof and was responsible for a cooperation with the PEEK project, in which a research installation at the Volkskunde Museum Vienna in 2021 was developed. The events of the PEEK project hosted by the Volkskunde Museum Vienna as its national cooperation partner would thus be read as open spaces of unlearning and alternative knowledge production, which are still not established in curatorial methods of art museums. The PEEK project thus exemplifies how discourses of order in museums can be critically questioned and how museums can work together with communities and marginalized actors on museum canons, narratives and exhibition formats. In the course of these formats initiated by the PEEK project institutional positions opened up. For beyond the controversy over censorship, research installations, symposia and workshops of the PEEK project was evaluated as knowledge production in its own right-with relevance for both specialized scholarship and museums. With these contributions the project not only demonstrated a scenographically and image-politically sensitive approach to Mühl's work, but also developed research-based film or audio formats and exhibition narratives that focused on elements of violence in Mühl's work. The fact that the required strategies of image withdrawal are not only about not showing Mühl's works in exhibitions, but also about reflecting on their potentially violent effect on visitors and protecting the personal rights of those involved. Previous exhibition narratives, which describe Viennese Actionism as a transgression of content-related, material, and aesthetic boundaries, would thus be placed in the perspective of boundary violations that continue to have an effect on the actors involved today. With this knowledge, the thesis of radical self-exposure and self-injury in Viennese Actionism, which also claims validity for Mühl's actions before 1970, could be critically examined in the future.