Vienna 8, Laudongasse 15 - 19: Volkskunde - Museum - City

In 2017 the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in Viennas Josefstadt district will have been housed in the baroque Schönborn garden palace for exactly 100 years. The project presented here takes this anniversary as an opportunity to reflect in a comprehensive and lasting way on the tasks and aims, both historical and current, of a (cultural) historical museum, and to communicate this to the public. The exhibition Vienna 8, Laudongasse 1519: Volkskunde Museum City (working title) is planned as the main annual exhibition for 2017/18 and therefore constitutes the museums major form of display and communication in this jubilee year. The exhibition is based on the FWF project P 21442 on the history of the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art between 1930 and 1950, carried out by Birgit Johler and Magdalena Puchberger1. Using perspectives from cultural anthropology and museum studies, this project delivers the first comprehensive account of a (cultural) historical museum in Austria during these years marked by political upheavals. It can also be seen as part of wider current research on ethnological knowledge and the production and popularisation of that ethnological knowledge in the 20th century. The exhibition will focus in particular on the 1930s and the high concentration and diversity of phenomena relating to folk life and folk art in the (capital) city of Vienna during this period. The museum will be viewed as both an institution and a social space, allowing connections to be drawn between different contexts, in turn revealing the urban dynamics and cultural shifts also as they relate to the period of National Socialism and the early years of the Second Republic. In doing so, the non-linear path of an academic discipline just getting started and in search of broad social and civic alliances is illuminated, as well as that of ethnology as a community of shared interests and experiences, which was continually searching for or having to find innovative, original, ideologically and politically flexible formats for education and entertainment. The aim of the exhibition is to offer an incisive look at the museum as a place both then and now. This will take account aspects of low-threshold participation as part of applied trends in ethnology at that time, whilst also relating these to contemporary participatory practices. The current (re)positioning of the museum as a platform for interaction and an open house (symbolised in 2015 by keeping the gate open between the museum and the public park, offering free entry to the museum) opens up approaches for reflection and analysis within the exhibition, as befits the jubilee year. Through the exhibition and the planned accompanying programme, with their innovative and focused modes of presentation and communication, the project team/curators seek a nuanced critical engagement with the many-layered place Laudongasse 1519 and its heterogeneous history. 1 Strategies for museums in times of political upheaval: The Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art in the years between 1930 and 1950, duration: 01.04.201031.07.2015. The end report is in preparation, due 31.10.2015.

In 2017, the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art (Volkskundemuseum) marked 100 years of the museum moving into the Schönborn Palace in Viennas eighth district. The exhibition heimat:machen took this anniversary, as well as the research that had been carried out into the history of the museum, the building and the people who have shaped it, to examine the history, positioning and activities in the name of Volkstum and Heimat in urban environments and the capital of Vienna. The exhibition places a special emphasis on the years 1930-1950, especially the interwar period, which proved to be especially formative, with long-lasting effects for both the national and urban production and communication of Heimat. The nature of the folk culture (Volkskultur) developed during this period as well as the formation of personal, institutional, academic and political networks had an impact on the period of the Nazi regime, the immediate post-war period and the Second Austrian Republic. The exhibition was innovative not only in demonstrating the relevance of museum history for the present, but also in the constellation of exhibition location and exhibition topic. The Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art was shown as a place of influence, but also as having been influenced, and so the exhibition encompassed historical rooms with several encoded layers of meaning and the collection of the museum in particular, offering a new way for an institution to represent itself and its history. The exhibition investigated the relationship between the museum and the city, showing museological practices in the context of (cultural)political developments and positioned the institution in the dynamic academic, cultural, social and also economic contexts. Using specific objects from the museums collection, the exhibition is an invitation for the viewer to consider them as mediators for the ideologically underpinned ideas, projects and actors that reflect and characterise Volkstum und Heimat. The aim of the exhibition and the comprehensive and varied programme of events that accompanied it was also to introduce the museum as USEUM, and to mark and approach the question of how the institution has been used by interested parties, political and public interests and who, today, still have an interest in the museum, its contents or even just the space in which it is located and its particular public.