Synoptic storytelling in a multidirectional Vienna

Synoptic storytelling in a multidirectional Vienna stages the “Synoptic Portraits” method developed by Friedemann Derschmidt and evaluates its potential in terms of how we understand, learn and teach history and memory politics in Vienna’s diverse migration society. Based on specific examples of multilingual and transgenerational, video-based memory narratives, it will be shown how artistic potential can serve to counteract memory competition by working out the individual, diverse, global, and local dimensions of identities and their stories and specifically connecting them with each other.

The project operationalizes the concepts of multidirectional memory (Rothberg, 2009) and postmemory (Hirsch, 2002), which are based on discourse analyzes of the artistic-discursive field, by examining how different memory narratives and family memories, which are also in conflict with one another, run through the subject positions of the narrators. What Rothberg 2009 shows as externalized, conflict-ridden, and yet connectable group discourses are embedded in the arrangement of the synoptic portrait in the individual narratives by a speaker. With this, we propose a method of artistic display practice that makes it possible to make the decentering of the subject visible with the aim of being able to work out the non-identitarian aspect of the historical-political moment.

The video installations in museums and educational institutions based on synoptic portraits are intended to create aesthetic spaces of possibility in order to make cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957) perceptible not only in what is felt to be “foreign” but also in what is “one’s own.” In the best case, it would be possible to show to what extent the threatening nature of the other arises from one’s own false projection (Horkheimer, Adorno 1969). The perception of difference in Vienna’s urban space is seen as an opportunity to integrate one’s own parts of foreignness and to initiate processes of solidarity. These initial theses will be tested and further developed through participatory research with visitors to our planned exhibitions and in school classes.

Panni (Anna) Oplatka

born in Budapest behind the “Iron Curtain” as the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors. As an elementary school student, she experienced the uprising in 1956. After completing her training, she moved to Munich with her baby, where her husband, an Austrian with Hungarian roots, worked. As a housewife, mother and childminder, she slowly learned the language. After the birth of their second daughter, the family moved to Vienna in 1974 and in 1978 she began to work part-time at the Federal Monuments Office. Since her retirement she has been working as a volunteer health partner and reading mentor..

Niki (Brenislav) Nikolic

was born in 1958 in what was then Yugoslavia as the grandson of a communist partisan in a village in Voivodina. His mother was a Holocaust victim. His parents migrated to Vienna in the early 1970s when Niki was 12 years old. At the age of 18 he returned to Yugoslavia because he had to do military service to renew his passport. There he was elected to the Communist Soldiers’ Council. In 1980 he disarmed from military service and a month later Josip Bros Tito died. He found out about this on the way back to Vienna. As a result, he worked in various professions, most recently as a computer specialist, before becoming self-employed. After the death of his father, the issue of his origins caught up with him and he founded a non-profit association called Gipsy-Info (Gipsy Radio and TV) and has since pursued an educational mission within and outside the Roma community..

Annemarie Steidl

grew up in Upper Austria’s Innviertel in a market near Braunau. Her parents were inn owners. She worked her way out of the milieu on her own and went to Vienna to study. Today she is an associate professor at the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include migration studies from the 18th century to the present, industrialization and urbanization, history of crafts, gender studies and quantitative methods. In 2005 she was awarded the international René Kuczynski Prize for her monograph on the mobility of Viennese craftsmen in the 18th and 19th centuries..

Marwan Abado

was born in Beirut in 1967. Born in Palestine, he has been living in Vienna for over 30 years and is considered the best-known ambassador of oriental music in Austria. He is one of those musicians who prove that Austria is a music country full of inspiration and interesting encounters. He has played with many musicians from a wide variety of cultures and styles, including Paul Gulda, Roland Neuwirth, Timna Brauer, Alegre Correa, Krysztof Dobrek, Franz Hautzinger, Eliott Sharp, Kamilia Jubran, Otto Lechner, Charbel Rohana, Simone Pergmann, Sahar Taha. In November 2008, Abado received the Federal Medal for Intercultural Dialogue for his commitment in this area from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture. In addition to his own musical programs, Abado has also composed for film and theater..

Bettina Henkel

born in Germany, lives and works in Vienna as an artist and filmmaker. She teaches fine arts/new media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. There she heads the media laboratory. After training in dance, she studied art history in Munich, free painting and art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and visual media design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna with Peter Weibel. Coming from the field of video art and photography, her focus today is on artistic documentary film..

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