WORKING CLASS ECOLOGIES

Thank you

For waking up early to prepare breakfast
For washing, ironing, and vacuum-cleaning
For mending the clothes
For maintaining office toilets
For building the city
For taking care of the waste
For continuing to work when ill and weak
For embracing the undesired intimacy
For the swollen breasts
For the pain in the back and the hands
For the sleepless nights
For the care and affection
For delivering food and newspapers
For working in another country
For taking two jobs
For caring for the elderly
For going to sleep last

Does this seem familiar?
here do you see yourself in relation to these roles?

Let us rethink our positions with care and affection for our actions and the actions of the people around us and around the world. We are all immersed in everyday life, fulfilling the tasks and sometimes even assigning them. Take a moment or two for ourselves.

What do we all have in common? How do we manage to find ways to express our discomfort and gratitude? We are strong to speak about our experiences. More of us would understand these than you might think. Your thoughts make us stronger.

You are seen and you are valued.

WIENWOCHE invites you to engage with the alienation, environmental and economic crisis that we are facing in the (post-)pandemic world. The struggles against underrepresentation, discrimination, and precarisation of the class, gendered and racialized body, and nature are interconnected in Global Capitalism. The caregiving, maintenance, and domestic work are unpaid or poorly paid, and feminized in the current political, economic system. Women*, binary vulnerable societal groups of indigenous and people of color, along with land are considered as resources to fulfill the needs of the desire for mass production. The earth is sharing the same environmental crisis, however, different societies have incomparable possibilities to deal with it. As an example; exported trash will counter-turn in a vicious circle, ending up as microplastics in our oceans and diffusing in our imported food.

The climate crisis and pandemic made societal injustices and inequalities more visible, as they endanger the political, public, and even private spaces of the lower-income classes and the precarious. The question of solidarity shattered. The frontline essential migrant and ghettoized Austrian workers, as well as seasonal workers in underpaid or undocumented positions, continued working overtime in uncertain, dangerous-to-health labor conditions. Staying at home for some was a compulsion, as the nature of their work did not correspond to the needs of the market in a digital environment. Limited physicality actualized the question of public participation, access, and contribution. Also, for the women*, the amount of reproductive labor and domestic violence was increased during the lockdown.

What do we have to unlearn in order to stop reproducing patriarchal stereotypes?

Do you consider yourself to be a housewife*? How can we develop awareness against undervalued care labor, considering your own?

Why do you not want to be a worker?

What is the relation between the care towards nature and the care for society?

What is your proposal for alternative ecological strategies sensitive to class, gender and race?

How could the struggle include children and elderly?

How to create a global care movement?

Send your applications to ausschreibung@wienwoche.org

Deadline: Sunday, February 13, 2022

Selected projects within WIENWOCHE 2022 will take place September 16-25, 2022.

What we are looking for

• Your ideas on how to incorporate the festival theme in your project
• Big and small productions; co-operations with different institutions/action groups; projects in the making, or projects that are already existing and fit the festival topic, like platforms, workshops, performative lectures, etc.
• Projects in public spaces, (un)conventional spaces within contemporary arts or projects specially designed for specific spaces of historical and cultural importance
• Social inclusivity in your work
• We encourage interactive and participatory exchange with local communities and collaborations of several communities

Who can apply

• Collectives, action groups and individuals
• All genders, social groups and backgrounds related to the city of Vienna (thematically or geographically)

Please send us

• Description of the project (2 pages max.)
• Profiles/CVs of the participants
• Information on the venues and spaces you have in mind for your projects
• Mention of the target groups and communities you are addressing
• Calculations (Please fill in the form BUDGET.)
• Visual material
• Languages: German, English (If you want to send your application in other languages, please write to us beforehand.)

The application can be in a written form (a single PDF file) or submitted in a video format (2-3 minutes max. with relevant info about your concept). If you decide to send your application in video form, please still attach profiles/CVs and calculations in the written form).

The 2022 Open Call info-event:

Zoom, February 2, 2022, 3–7 pm
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87657097614?pwd=NmhMR1lSTnBVS01reGFwb0NiZzN5QT09
Meeting ID: 876 5709 7614
Passcode: 095755