Stuben-Forum

Symposium in the context of the exhibition
The Uncomfortable Science – Act II by Gareth Kennedy

Within the context of the exhibition The Uncomfortable Science – Act II by Gareth Kennedy, shown in the Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum, the 2nd Stuben-Forum will take place in the same setting. The masks will be presented on this occasion, and a debate will be held on the construction of history, the instrumentalization of traditions, and performativity.

In the frame of a 2nd Stuben-Forum special guests will introduce the masks for the first time in Innsbruck and muse once more on the value and consequences of their performance to a contemporary public. Speakers include Karl C. Berger, Reinhard Bodner, James R. Dow, Franz J. Haller, Thomas Nußbaumer, Hannes Obermair, Heidi Schatzl, with contributions from Helena Pereña and Andrei Siclodi.

Andrei SICLODI (*1972 in Bucharest) is a curator, writer, editor and cultural worker whose theoretical research focuses on forms of critical-emancipatory knowledge production in art. He is director of Künstler:innenhaus Büchsenhausen in Innsbruck and founding director of the Fellowship Program for Art and Theory which takes place there. He is also editor of the publication series „BÜCHS‘N’BOOKS – Art and Knowledge Production in Context“ and producer of the monthly radio broadcast „Büchs’n’Radio“ on Radio Freirad.

Franz J. Haller 1948* in Meran (Südtirol) is an visual anthropologist and editor of a monograph about Arthur Scheler’s Southtyrol Archive.
Haller studied ethnology at Vienna University and visual anthropology at Göttingen University, with field research in northern and central Africa and the Amazonian lowlands. He co-founded the Landwirtschafts-Museum Brunnenburg in Dorf Tirol in 1974. From 1976 to 1979 he was a research professor at OAS (Organization of American States) at the University of Quito, Ecuador. Haller has produced over 180 documentary films on the ethnography and recent history of the South Tyrol for television, schools and museums. He founded the internet portal www.tirolerland.tv.

Hannes Obermair was born in Bolzano in 1961. His research areas relating to the history of the region include comparative urban history, cultural history and the early written word in the central Alps. In particular, his work focuses on transitional phenomena, forms of acculturation and the ‘grey areas’ that accompany and define the development of the Tyrol and Trento regions in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era. Much of his more recent work has considered questions of contemporary history and historiography in the context of fascism and the Nazi era. He took part in preparing the permanent exhibition BZ ’18-’45: one monument, one city, two dictatorships within Bolzano’s Monument to Victory, opened to the public in 2014, which has been granted with a special commendation of the European Museum of the Year Award 2016.

Heidi Schatzl (DI) studierte Landschaftsplanung. Seit 2005 arbeitet sie an der Schnittstelle Raum, Kunst und Forschung. Künstlerisch-wissenschaftliche Feldforschungen zum nationalsozialistischen Urbanismus und räumlichen Praktiken. Lebt in Wien.
Die Feldforschung Vom Leben in den Hitlerbauten wurde 2009 in der Ausstellung Right, to the City in der Landesgalerie Linz, als auch beim Festival der Regionen gezeigt. In der von ihr angeregten Ausstellung im Linzer Nordico 2012 war die Installation NS-Urbanismus ausgezeigt. Für The Protest of Linz 1945 erhielt sie 2014 das Margarethe Schütte Lihotzky Projektstipendium. Die installative Präsentation, der eine umfassende Recherche in Israel und Österreich zugrunde lag, war bis 2016 im Schlossmuseum Linz zu sehen. Aktuell arbeitet sie an einer Recherche zu den enteigneten Bauten Adolf Loos’ und an einer Auftragsarbeit für das Museum der Friedensgemeinde Erlauf.

James R. Dow is Professor Emeritus for German Folklore and Linguistics at Iowa State University. His publications include The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich (1994), The Study of European Ethnology in Austria (2004), und die Zimbrische Gesamtgrammatik (2008). His second research area is devoted to German-speaking minorities in Iowa, for example with the Old Order Amish and the Amana Colonists. For more than 30 years he was »Senior Bibliographer« for the Modern Language Association of America. In 2005 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2013 an American Philosophical Society Fellowship for his research on South Tyrol.

Karl C. Berger is European ethnologist and director of the Tiroler Volkskunstmuseum.

Reinhard Bodner (*1980 Innsbruck) is an Ethnologist and working on a research project about the strive renovation during National Socialism.

Thomas Nußbaumer was born in Hall in the Tyrol (Austria). He studied musicology and German at the Universität Innsbruck, obtaining a doctorate in 1998. His dissertation was published in 2001 as Alfred Quellmalz und seine Südtiroler Feldforschungen (1940–42): Eine Studie zur musikalischen Volkskunde unter dem Nationalsozialismus (Alfred Quellmalz and his field research in the South Tyrol (1940–42): A study on music folklore under National Socialism). In 2011 Nussbaumer completed a postdoctoral thesis on folk music at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna. He has taught at the Innsbruck campus of the Universität Mozarteum Salzburg since 1995, becoming a lecturer in 2011. He is head of the departmental area for music ethnology within the department of musicology. His research and publications focus on music and custom, carnival, folk music and Nazism, Alpine folk music traditions (western Austria and the South Tyrol in particular), and the music of the Old Order Amish.