L>FiST 03-09/2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_77t9SU1iH0&list=PLGkfnE1Gm55RaI-DKLWLL0zbI9aujzWs5

The moment has come to invite people from near and far, well, rather far (friends and colleagues from the inner city scene) to make public that 7 people are missing, 7 people like you and me, or maybe even a bit more interesting, more eccentric, more misunderstood, more significant, if they would ever have gotten a chance, are missing -- but no one is actually missing them.

The team of 7 representatives gather. 

The "detective” ZAK RAY coordinating it all is designing a spatial installation dominated by a structure of 4 free hanging projection screens forming an inner “ritual square” that still remains transparent.

The thing about it: It cuts off heads. 

7 billiard balls represent 7 absent people who have become pawns of an unknown destiny. To where did they roll?

Ball Nr. 8 will set the search in motion. 

Fishy selling “Asterix. Die Trabantenstadt” before the show to raise funds for the search. Markus Liszt approves. 

Each representative is now doing whatever they can to make people aware of the missing person they have been assigned to. 

Goran C. was a lover of machines. No machine is ever xenophobic. S. Carneiro represents him by running the complex image program (with Markus Liszt), showing the 7 versions of “Seestadt” each of the 7 probably knew. 

To honour Franz A., the lost taxi driver, H. Wurm, also calling himself Fishy (which will prove to be prophetic) is performing as a rock of stability in the projection of his own night drives from “Seestadt” to the inner city and back. 

He also designed a map of all stages of the “Seestadt” to refer to his photographic memory and sense for the layers of landscapes, urban and rural. 

Vanja F., in deep resonance with mysterious Elfriede, has found refuge in a boat. There she is singing the sad song about the English Rose. Elfriede did not mind to go with strange men. And being as bored, sad and poor as she was she was not picky. A very dangerous habit. 

K. Stefan has built a strange, posthuman organism to honour Dorith B’s hate of the images of man. 

A. Kronheim loves to walk on his own, like his absent twin. With an old phone he took photos of the landscape Christoph D. might have passed as well untill he disappeared in one of them.

Bertold G. loved to drink, he needed to sooth his hate of humanity and his hunger for money to compensate it. T. Klingler knows what a good bar can do and ran one in perfect calm.

D. Aschwanden is dancing with K. Stefans morphing structure to send a message to the missing Anna E.

For it has been discovered that the mysterious kinetic sculpture is actually a sender! 

Maybe it has been left behind by the seven so that we can reach them?

The show is over, some came, some looked and listened, but still no lead.

Summer is brooding over Seestadt. It is even emptier and even sleepier than during the rest of the year.

No one bothers to look for 7 missing people.

So the search team needs to take a productive break and extend the method.

Maybe there are leads to be found in the movies?

In a special summer program on the "Cinema of Disappearance/Kino des Verschwindens" they gather in the FABRIK and enjoy the fine hosting and technical support of Markus Liszt.

The opening gala is a showing of the classic "Picnic at Hanging Rock" by Peter Weir 1975 (Not the recent series!)

It is a magic film on the disappearance of several young students and one teacher during an excursion to a sacred rock in Australia 1900.

The event was opened by a little (German) speech on disappearance by the odd but always engaged "leader" of the search team, ZAK RAY.

After having watched both versions of the "Stepford Wives", the one by Bryan Forbes 1975, and the more recent one by Frank Oz 2004, in a double feature, finding that the older one is much better, even though it lacks a postmodern plot twist after the fourth act, several members of the search team find striking similarities between this small American town and Seestadt.

Is this smile so alien to the otherwise grumpy Vienna not a little fake and frozen?

After all they did find out that no one cares about 7 missing misfits in this make-shift paradise.

So they decided to re-enact the lurid tale of house wives turned pleasant service robots.

Complete with self-made hats and tacky summer dresses they gathered in the only supermarket in town. It was a lazy summer afternoon and no one cared at all that those women were not behaving quite like ordinary humans.

So if anyone might come up with the idea of replacing people with robots: This was a very promising test that yes, you could!

In a final effort of desperation Anna E's representative Daniel A. decided to run. To run from the task to represent her a 2nd time, in yet another public show, as demanded by the authorities who financed the whole search.

But in another sense he invited people from Seestadt to join him in a memorial run around the little town, to follow a path where she used to run.

There were even T-Shirts being printed for the occasion!

Before she had left her fancy apartment in the building they call the "fat sister" after a horrible party to which no one had come (they accused her of having touched one of her teenage piano students the wrong way). A witness reported that she went into the night, on high heels, in a red Valentino dress, to never be seen again.

3 citizens announced their coming, one actually came.

And so Daniel ran with one co-runner.

But that was not all.

To give her a final greeting he let Anna E. enter his soul and system and gave us her final thoughts, AS Anna E.

Now that's a representative with skin, and soul, in the game!

And finally, on that cold September evening of the year 2017, it was clear.

That the 7 would never return as the 7 human individuals who had disappeared 6 months earlier, not being missed by anyone but a few freaks.

But they were also not dead and gone. They had maybe fused into a post-human Sevenfold entity. And the antenna/communicator designed by Kristoffer to communicate with them had maybe also become their multidimensional home.

The 2nd and final show to find the 7 circled around that amazing machine.

But in the end the 7 told us to bring it to the lake of Seatown; for that is where they wished to stay. 

All 7 representatives and a few ritual guests did so, freezing. 

We put the structure into the lake and drank Vodka to celebrate and get warm. 

It may be a tool connecting us to them, or it may be their new home, or it may even be them, as 7in1.

Whatever is the case, 3 big fish came along and swam around it. Not to be shown in a picture, but true.

From March to May 2017 a team of inter-disciplinary researchers set out on a quest to find traces of the disappeared 7.

Daniel Aschwanden, a seasoned urban scout, conducted a detailed research on the many ecologies of Seestadt Aspern.