Working on the ritual
Vogelweidplatz no. 13, in Vienna’s 15th district. Der Betrieb is open. The premises of Der Betrieb, though easy to find, are not particularly noticeable. Far removed from attention-grabbing architectures that isolate art from everyday life, as in museum quarters or on museum islands in the urban centres of the globalised art scene. This establishment presents itself as a cultural institution that is taken for granted in the neighbourhood. It just is. Here, in the urbanity of the ordinary, not far from the multi-lane traffic infrastructure of Vienna’s outer ring road, a busy shopping centre, a neighbourhood playground in the park across the street and next to a Taiwanese restaurant, dancer Anna Maria Nowak and dancer and choreographer Alexander Gottfarb started operations of Der Betrieb in October 2022. This season of Der Betrieb is dedicated to the ritual.
To do so in 2024 is as courageous as it is difficult. Rituals are part of the historical and cultural heritage. They are, in particular, tied to religious practice and at the same time related to articulations of tradition or custom, which were appropriated by fascism in the specific Austrian context and are therefore closely linked to the history of genocide. Today, migration society’s diverse forms of religious articulation as well as public manifestations practised by the far right make the ritual a battleground of religion and ideology. New rituals for the millions of dead people who have lost their lives due to the pandemic, the wars and unnatural disasters, for the victims of the climate catastrophe, for the species that have disappeared and are in the process of disappearing have not yet been invented. Moreover, neoliberal capitalism has discovered rituals as substantive and body-regenerating, low-threshold marketable and high-priced self-care offerings. These in turn have led to a new spiritual wellness capitalism, which is characterised by neocolonial cultural appropriation in a number of ways. In the face of the ritual as a battleground, of ritual deficit and the capitalisation of the ritual, it is extremely complex to redefine the practical meaning of the ritual. In the midst of this complexity, Der Betrieb works on the ritual and, at the same time, on account of its working method, challenges practised rituals of the culture industry itself by transforming them from within.
In a “project-mode driven culture industry”, the logic of runtimes and seasons combines with the logic of continuously outdoing one another with the promise of something unprecendented and the spirit of novelty. While this is the only reason many projects remain competitive in their fight for resources and infrastructures, Nowak and Gottfarb’s Betrieb is about duration. Duration is neither less time-consuming nor less strenuous. In contrast to short-term projectitis determined by public funding policies and commission logics, however, duration enables both repetition and transformation. Both of which characterise Gottfarb’s choreographic practice not only in a conceptual but also a practical sense. Repetition takes time. As does transformation. Repetition, which leads to transformation, and transformation, which is not understood as a fixed end product but as requiring further transformation, further change through repetition, need a temporality other than that of the accelerated rapidity of novelty. Duration, intensity, perseverance. This by no means equals less work but it defines the rhythm of work differently. It is based on the notion of a working day for choreographers, dancers, cultural workers in the broadest sense that refers to ideas of time that existed before the comprehensive neoliberalisation of the welfare-state time regimes that transformed lives into working hours. Der Betrieb at Vogelweidplatz works with these elements of the culture industry and transforms them. It is designed to run for many years, to consistently carry on working. To present seasons that operate with repetition and transformation within themselves instead of promising something new each season.
When a visitor enters Der Betrieb, they are welcomed. They are handed a tray. There are three edible things on it, to be eaten in a certain order: a paste on a spoon, a cracker, a liquid in a small bowl. Visitors are given a piece of paper on which they are invited to write a sentence or just a word and place it on the tray for the “Dedications”. The papers are burned later on. Cress seeds have been prepared to complete the ritual: all visitors are invited to sprinkle them into a small terracotta plate near the door. The visitors themselves can determine the amount of time they take for the ritual. This can be ten minutes or even several hours. The invitation issued by Der Betrieb to take part in a ritual here definitely transforms the way in which the movements performed by the dancers are looked at. Being in a ritual is different from being at a performance. While the mode of performance, production or presentation demands specific, culturally learned viewing conventions and very specific attention intensities, the ritual demands completely different ones. It is up to the visitors to generate them. What the dancers and their movements impressively embody and demonstrate is that ritual always requires ritual workers. Rituals are not easy, they must be taken care of. Rituals are work, in a very literal sense. In order to experience the temporality of the ritual, it is necessary to work on the ritual. Making the work on the ritual itself – which, like other forms of collective care work, has been made invisible by history – visible, perceptible, tangible, identifiable and at the same time not prescribing, not imposing the meaning this ritual in Der Betrieb serves, is the complex redefinition of the ritual that is carried out at Der Betrieb during the Ritual Season.
Elke Krasny is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with a research focus on critical spatial practices, memory work, care and transnational feminisms. Co-editor with Barbara Büscher and Lucie Ortmann of Porös-Werden – Geteilte Räume, urbane Dramaturgien, performatives Kuratieren, Vienna 2024.