Good morning and welcome from my part too. My name is Gautron Rath. I work here at the Department of Cultural Studies. And I have the honor to moderate this roundtable that will be the closing session also of this symposium and I want to briefly present our guests here today to my left Edward Serota is an American born Vienna based writer, photographer and filmmaker who has been working in Central and Eastern Europe for 40 years and Edward has produced four films for ABC News in the US and his documentaries have been shown in 31 film festivals. He has also published books of photography and written various publications, also books of photography. And since 2000, he has been the director of Centropa, a Vienna-based Jewish historical institute, which he will also talk about today. In the middle Georgia Holtz is an art historian also based in Vienna. She works as an independent curator as well, author and editor. She's a scientist at the Department of site-specific art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. And she's also on the board of Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna. And she's also a member of VBKÖ. And this is the project she will talk about today. And then finally we have Vidaba Kondondi who works as a historian and curator also in Vienna. She currently researches, she's currently a research associate at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and her research focuses on vernacular and family archives and also her ongoing research project is centered on a private photo collection but today vida will talk about another project that has already been concluded and this project was called get I've the gishito you can see it up there in the left and that was a project at the museum and that was already had or has already been concluded so thank you very much for coming, the three of you. We have been talking yesterday a lot about gaps in archives, silences, histories that have always been there but have not been talked about or noted sufficiently. And the three different projects we want to talk about now have very different strategies or methodologies to oppose those gaps or exclusions that have been produced throughout history. Maybe, Vida, could you start telling us about this project at Wien Museum, that the exhibition is already over, but the struggles and claims are not and maybe you could tell us a little bit about this history how the whole project came up hello thank you for inviting me to talk about this project that was finished already eight years ago in 2016. The exhibition was an outcome of this project, which was actually a collecting project called Migrationssammeln, collecting migration. It was launched by the city of Vienna in cooperation with the Wien Museum in 2015. They made a call and asked a group or a number of people to apply to kind of realize this collecting project and we we were the team of four structurally based at the with the platform for minorities initiative i will come back to this NGO shortly. And so we were granted this job that meant to collect for a year and a half objects related to the history of labor migration from Turkey and the former Yugoslavia to Vienna since the 1960s. So the intention came not from the community, like for example what we heard yesterday from Vienna, Chile. But it was kind of like the city and the museum reacted towards demands that were brought forward in the years before by different players. I want to mention two things in this context. One was the exhibition project Gasterbeiterei, 40 years of Labour Migration, that took part in, that was presented in the year 2004 by the Initiative Minderheiten, Plattform für Minorities in the Wien Museum and Public Library at Göthl. I was a member of the research team back then, I was a student and this exhibition Back then I was a student and this exhibition project was very special. It was the first that brought the topic of migration, in this specific case of labor migration, into a museum, a big museum in Austria. And it was also special due to the kind of collaboration that we realized. We were an NGO that collaborated with people from the arts and eventually with the museum to realize this exhibition project. And one of our aims was to kind of integrate the topic, the theme of migration into like for nachhaltig, I was looking for the word, kind of into the museum, systematically into the museum. However, this is kind of the sustainable integration could not be realized and materials from the exhibition were not included into the collection. And also the model of co-production between civil society and the museum was not continued. was not continued. So as an outcome of that also, two of the members of the research team, Arif Akkalic and Lubomir Bratic, launched a poster campaign in 2012 in the frame of the cultural festival Wienwoche, demanding an archive of migration now. So, and this campaign reached a lot of attention by the media, but also by representatives of the city. So we started to, we got in talks with the city and the outcome of that was this, this collecting project that was designed by the museum, by the director of the museum, not by the staff of the, but by the director of the museum and the responsibles from the city. So as I, to sum up, structurally the collecting initiative was located or connected to the Initiative Minderheiten so we were not integrated into the museum for this project but we were kind of working independently from the museum we had two curators that assisted us from the museum whom we met in periodic meetings to discuss the things that we collected. And what was an outcome of that, that the deeper exploration of the migration team in the museum was not realized again. So maybe that's as a start. Thank you very much. It's very interesting that you mentioned this campaign from Wienwoche in 2012. I think the whole slogan was Historiography Now, Equality Now, Archive Now from Lubomir Bratic and Akelic. So would you say that this exhibition at Wienwoche, at Wienmuseum, sorry, can already be seen as part of this demand for an archive? Is it an archive? In a way it is, I mean, not really, but back then we also created a website and it's still online. You can reach it on gastarbeit.at and all the research that we gathered is available online. The materials that we showed in the exhibition, except for the videos that we produced. So somehow we created an archive with that, but not that was, as I said before, the museum didn't integrate some of the material into the collections. I mean, this has also to do with the character of the material that we showed. I mean, we showed a lot of papers. We showed photographs, papers. We didn't show, sometimes we showed originals, but in many cases just duplicates. And that's not something that a museum wants to collect because they are interested in originals. And that was one of the challenges with the collecting migration projects because they ask for original three-dimensional objects that stemmed from private donors, not only but from the private sphere, from migrants themselves so yeah and maybe I can talk about this later. Yeah thank you very much. Georgia in your case we have a very different case it's a project that has a very long history. And maybe you can also tell us a little bit about this very specific history of the association and also maybe about what kind of archive this is you have in your case? Yeah, maybe I would start with the project that my co-researcher, my partner in crime, so to speak, Stephanie Mieser, who unfortunately cannot be here today, and me embarked in. It was a project entitled Anonymity and Absence, Archival Sites of Speculation, which was based at the, or is still based at the university of applied arts it's a so-called intra project which is a very nice form of funding internally for our for actual research um and um we are both as artists and researchers stephanie and I'm a curator and art historian. We're both interested not only in archives and the way artistic research can provide a different view on archives but we are also both members of the VBKÖ, the Vereinigung Bildender Künstlerinnen in Österreich. And we are both interested in Austrian art history, so to speak, and the gaps in art history or in the canon. And we are both members of this association. We are active members in the sense that we are also part of this archive team and dealing with the archive and so it was clear to us that the Fabrika ÖS archive would be our case study so to speak and from this position we conceived this project which was designed as a series of workshops with artists who are dealing with archives, also colonial archives from an artistic research and fictional perspective also. and we were doing screening and finally realizing an exhibition together with these invited artists, but also students of mine who were involved in the whole project for a year long project and would also produce artworks that were really, that were responding specifically to items in the archive of the VWKÖ. And this exhibition happened in January at the VWKÖ, at the premises of the VWKÖ. And yeah, maybe I would like to just briefly mention our questions that we had mention our research questions that we had in connection with this archive. And that was, of course, how to confront archival blind spots and make productive sense of these absences within the archive. Then, if the current mode of systematization in archival science instigates epistemic violence. How can one confront the anonymous authorship and witnessing of the archive and give what is missing a silent legibility? And how can the missing parts of an archive be embodied? That was really important to us. And to consider the archive as a body itself. And how can an alternative and unwritten history be woven into what is present within this collection of the archive of the VWKÖ? And so we were trying to create kind of an experimental space to understand what the archive is and what it could be and to make sense of these documents. Yes, maybe I'll stop for now. Can you just add a little explanation about what is this association, maybe not everyone knows about this. I can speak about that for an hour now. Okay, the VBKÖ, the Vereinigung Bildender Künstlerinnen Austria, was founded in 1910 and it was a private bourgeois project, I would say, by women artists who had the means to do this. And they specifically responded to the excluding policies of other artists associations in Vienna, namely the Secession, the Künstlerhaus, Hagenbund and all the other associations that only would allow men. The same went for the Academy of Fine Arts, which also would not accept women, female students at that time. The only exception was the K&K Kunstgewerbeschule, the now University of Applied Arts, which allowed female students right from the start in 1863, but like very similar to the Bauhaus, pushed them very much into applied arts. And also for a few years, several years, they were banned from becoming students again because there were just too many. So this is kind of the cultural sphere that was present at the time. And so these women teamed up, realized and teamed up to form their own association because they were so excluded. association because they were so excluded and also the aim was to not only prevent to lobby for an official academic education for women artists but also to enable them to show their artwork and sell their artwork which was very important of course to gain economic independence. to gain economic independence. And so they founded themselves in 1910, then by the then president, Baronin Olga Brandt-Krieghammer, and two fellow artists, a painter and a sculptor. They would reach out to a network all over Europe actually to artists other female artists women artists in Paris in Munich in Berlin wherever and to to to also have corresponding members and so their network was really wide and good and it worked out also for their first exhibition that they managed to organize in 1910 which is really a seminal exhibition it's the first ever attempt to write women art history women's art history it was called the kunstafrau taking place at the secession they had to rent the secession and pay quite a lot of fees to the secession to be able to do that. And actually, I would like to show to you the catalog of this exhibition. So we trained, I did not really train this, but I think I'm supposed to also show it into the camera. So I hope this works now. Yeah, and you can see it says Secession on the cover. But if you open it up, you can see that it was the 37th exhibition of the Secession and the first exhibition of the Vereinigung Bildender Künstlerinnen in 1910. And it's really the first ever attempt to write women into art history, women only. And they did quite a lot of research. They brought in also historical figures like Vigie Le Brun and like really from all over Europe, prestigious artworks and they also they were supported by the emperor and got a lot of loans also from public collections, not public at the time but so and it and these historical artworks were combined with contemporary artworks of the members then and it was quite a success the members could also sell artworks it was really an economic excess which then the secession used to ask for more rent and this also already shows at this dilemma of invisibility and not being part of the Austrian art history or still having, suffering invisibility in a sense of that it's not the history of the VWKÖ has been researched mostly by US American academics who published in English. US American academics who published in English and there is one or there are two scholars from Austria who very early researched this history that's Sabine Plackholm-Forsthuber and Rudolfine Lackner the former president of the VBKÖ and who also opened the archive and but yeah this shows the dilemma of invisibility in a sense that this catalog is listed in every database as a session catalog. And yeah, maybe this is a point I can come to later again. It's this kind of maybe archival activism also that is needed maybe. Yeah, but sorry, now I got lost. But yeah, it's really a troubled history of the VBKÖ. It's a long history. The members have been fighting invisibility then and they still are, we still are. And maybe also an interesting aspect is the fact that the VBKÖ was very much involved in international socialism. And the so-called Gleichschaltung and merging with other associations is documented in the archive. We have it in the archive as well as very violent objects like members registers where the Jewish members would be crossed out and marked as half Jewish married to Jew. So we have all this in the collection, but there are also great, great parts missing, we assume. And yeah, and we, yeah, I think I stopped praying. Maybe I come back to the history again later. Thank you very much. So, Edvard, your project is dedicated exclusively to Jewish life histories. And it is a project that has already a long history also and it's a project that's very much focusing on digitization. Could you tell us a little bit more about this how it all came to be and how you proceeded to record those histories. Sure. It's on, right? I think all archives and all art movements and anything to do with the creativity is always a reaction to something that was being done that people got pissed off about and wanted to do something better and felt that there was a huge gap. Or, you know, since many of you are from Vienna, the whole idea of looking at architecture on the streets, it's not necessarily that buildings are in conversation with each other, they're yelling at each other to say, you know, you think you could have this neo-Baroque here? Well, let's take a look right behind the Hofburg of Adolf Loos' banking house. And it's always so stimulating to see what's done and that things are done in reaction. So obviously what you've done is, you know, the gaping holes in women's history in archives is frustrating, depressing. And that it's being done at all is heroic. And also, most of us doing this kind of thing are like a Don Quixote. But we do the same. The same thing with archives belonging to people coming from ex-Yugoslavia and the so-called gastarbeiter. No, they're not guests. I hope that you can expand things to the Syrians, especially because the Syrians on the Brunengasse have really upgraded the level of food that you can now get fabulous falafel like all through the place. And that's something that really should be done. I assign you to do this. And then I'll be one of the tasters so that's that we can judge i'm uh starting in in uh a long time ago uh in in the 1980s i was working as a journalist in central and eastern europe uh and i spent the my own archive of work was that I decided to focus. I used to collect photography before I took photographs. I used to actually make money before I decided to go into the arts and make nothing. And and I like to collect photographs that you could get from the American Library of Congress for almost nothing because they belonged to the people. So you could buy pictures. And I was fascinated with the photographs that they had from what was called the WPA, the Works Progress Administration, that was formed during the Depression. And that they sent photographers out, Dorothea Lange and others, Walker Evans, to photograph basically what poverty looked like. And there were people even before that. And I was fascinated with documentary photography because it's something that you keep forever. I made my first trip to Central and Eastern Europe in 1984. I was doing something for some American magazines, nothing to do with Jews. I just kept running into them. And I was taking pictures and getting their stories. And I photographed in this part of the world, that part of the world, I should say, between 1984 and 1999. It was 15 years. I moved to Budapest to live in 1988 when it was still under communism. And the revolutions of 1989 just walked into my lap. They walked in front of my camera. And so I could pretend I was actually a news photographer and sold pictures there. And then I covered the war in Bosnia. And all of that I did. And then my own archive was to photograph uh and write about the influx of uh jews from the soviet union to germany uh not so much to uh to austria because people had hired me in germany to do that i thought that was all fascinating i was making films for american television and in 1999 i, I was in Romania in a town called Arad. And they had a soup kitchen run by a 93-year-old woman. And the food was fantastic. And so I convinced my bosses at ABC News to let me do a half-hour documentary on a Jewish soup kitchen in a small town in Romania. I'm still amazed that they let me do it. And while sitting there with them, they would often take me home with them, sit with me in their apartments, show me pictures, and start telling me stories. And I said, pardon me for the children listening at home home but who the fuck collects this stuff there are lots of video interview projects with holocaust survivors talking about the holocaust extremely important the holocaust is mankind's single greatest crime in modern man of course so i i get that but i felt that was missing something When you sit with an 80 or 85 year old person who's telling you about the entire century, just as they lived it, you've got an archive. Each one of them is an archive. And I didn't see, I didn't think that using video was the right way to do it, by the way. I think video is a good way to do a project, but as someone who worked in television and someone who worked in print, I never thought that was the best way to do it. For the simple reason, you're sitting in your, or lying in your hotel bed at night after doing something, you go, I forgot to ask a question. If you made a video, you have baked the cake. You can't go back and put the little pineapple pieces in after you've baked it. But if you've done an interview audio, taped it, you can go back the next day, the next day, the next day. We have people we interviewed in Vienna. We're still getting information from them 20 years after we interviewed them. And we're still dropping them in. So it's a different way to interview it's uh as as an archive what we decided to do was to combine family pictures and and stories from an entire century audio tape we had this before even digital tape audio transcribe every single word translate it uh and then digitize the photographs and fill in like 30 rubrics of when the picture was taken, who was in the picture, etc., etc., what was their fate, where were they born, which country were they born, etc., etc. And we did all that. The archive ended up, the Centropa archive ended up, we interviewed between 2000 and 20 countries to be honest about four or five of those countries had two or three interviews so it's not that big a deal but ukraine we had 264 interviews we digitized 3 000 family pictures and we have over 4 000 pages pages of stories. Now, the whole archive is a total of 1,230 interviews, and it's about 40,000 pages of stories, and it's 25,000 pictures. Each one has a story. That entire archive has been sold to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And just so you know, they had their internal battles over whether they wanted this archive themselves. It took them 20 years because no one interviewed in this way. And this was to ask the oldest living Jews to tell stories about the entire century. That's what it is. The final thing I'll say about this, and then we'll have other discussions, the final thing I'll say about this is, starting in 2005, once our website went live, teachers started bombarding us with emails saying, what is your educational program? I went, I don't have one, goodbye. I never thought we'd go into education. But at least I was smart enough to know I knew nothing about education, especially since I'd been an awful student. But what I would do is I would go to different countries and with a translator or in the United States, I'd ask teachers to meet with me and tell me what they would do with the archive, what they felt was needed. So, our educational program was literally built by the people who would make it. I just came back from Ukraine. I've been there quite a lot. I was in the city of Chernihiv. It's right near the Russian border. And I was at the Federal Prison Authority because they have a program for students who want to learn, not prisoners, but their people in their academy who want to learn about Ukrainian Jewish history. Everything's already online in Ukrainian and the Centroba website. So, we brainstorm on how to use it. So, to me, the magic of having an archive, first of all, is get the stories, get the wonderful stories of, I'd love to see all the Yugoslav stuff. I spent a lot of time there uh and uh and uh and and and of course the the the women's archive it's when when you have the archive it's what you do with it after you get it and how it becomes useful for society um and that's what we do thank you very much um so one of the important aspects of of your archive is that it has been translated into different languages. We have been talking yesterday about the challenge of working in different languages at the same time. And for your project, I think this is very like a central aspect of the translation and facilitating translations of all those histories you collected for the website, right? Everything we did is difficult. We never found very many or a lot of organizations came to us. The African-American Museum in Washington and several other some Roma organizations. And our methodology is so complex that most everybody just walked away. Because the average interviewer to do an interview with us, by the time he or she finishes it, they're going to have invested 40 hours in each interview. That's the interview itself, and then the rest of it is getting it ready. So in each language, it becomes even more difficult. And nevertheless, my goal is to make sure that we create these archives for the people in that country. We're not German-centered. We did things in English, but all of the Polish archives are available for people in Poland in Polish. And then everything that's translated into English, we knock out all of the questions from the transcripts and turn it basically into a first-person ghostwritten story. Now, for an historian reading something from Poland, they won't like that. They want to read the original Polish word-for-word transcription, the same thing with the Ukrainian, etc., etc. So it gets very complex, but we make everybody happy, and we try to. Wieder, for your project, geteilte Geschichten, working in different languages was also very important, I assume. How did you deal with that in the exhibition, also in the moment of collecting the histories and the objects? Well, two of our team members in the collecting process, they were capable of speaking Turkish and they had Turkish or Kurdish Turkish background as well as now Serbian background. I'm also capable of communicating a bit in Serbo-Croatian. But many of the people that we spoke to were capable also of speaking German but this was concerning the exhibition it was very important for the museum to make it multilingual so we had four languages in the exhibition besides German and English we had booklets in Turkish and in Bosnian Croatian Ser, how it's now called. Um, the interviews are mixed, uh, German or Turkish or Yugoslav and, um, yeah, so, but we didn't, uh, our task was not to, um, uh, collect live narrative interviews, but to collect objects, which was also a disadvantage, I would say. It would have been much smarter to work together with other institutions in Vienna, like the Mediatheque, who collects life history interviews. So, yeah, we just collected the material and the stories connected to these materials, to these objects, to these photographs. Yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. But we can see one of these, one of the objects that was included in the exhibition. Yes, and in the collection. This is a very special object and for many reasons. It points to kind of like the agency of its former beholder who wanted who just not just gave personal items to the museum but wanted to define these items wanted to herself contextualize these items permanently so to herself contextualize these items permanently so I don't know if I have time to tell the story of this how I came to this cooking pot how we came to this cooking pot its original owner was Vasilija Stegic she came to Vienna at the beginning of the 1970s from Rijeka by herself. And she bought this cooking pot from her first salary. And I asked her whether she still is in possession of this cooking pot. And she said, no, yeah, she is, but it's in Rijeka. So after summer, she came back and she handed it over to us. But she just not handed it over to us, but put this date or it's actually the month and the year of when she bought it to, it says Jetschan 1973. So it's January 1973, the month and the year when she bought this cooking pot. And she did another thing. She produced an object for the museum. So she took one of her plates from the 1970s and she put in a photograph of herself and her daughter that showed them in her first caretaker apartment in Vienna. So this was also a biographical turning point because many migrants, especially from former Yugoslavia, they were looking for caretaker apartments at the beginning of the 1970s because there was guaranteed cheaper rent and a bit better housing conditions than others. And so the funny thing was that she got this plate that she used in this apartment, put in a photograph of herself and her daughter and also labeled it. And that was very special in the context of our collection process. So this pot from the perspective of the museum's guidelines was like the ideal object. But I think you mentioned in the beginning that many of those, of the other objects were not three-dimensional and did not respond to what the museum was expecting in a way, right? Yes. I mean, we didn't get any guidelines at the beginning of what could constitute an object of migration. So it was open to definition, which was an advantage for us. Because it provided us with flexibility and with the freedom to define. to define. And we realized, I mean we had some assumptions, some ideas due to our previous work on what could be possible materials, but we wanted to, how to say, to leave it open. And our strategy was to, we applied a practice-based methodology. So we defined key aspects of everyday life at the beginning, such as housing, work, consumption, relations to the country of origin, leisure activities and so forth. And then try to work with interviews and to define together with the participants what could possible objects of migration be. And eventually, I mean mean in this case I was asking her what she bought from a first salary and this was the answer so that's how I how we came to this to this object in the case of this drawing it's from it's a comic stripped and it was drawn by Hakan Gürses, who is a Vienna-based philosopher, musician. He was drawing this comic strip at the beginning of the 1990s. And so this object is kind of like a direct outcome of migration, a consequence of migration. So he was drawing this, I think it consists of 26 episodes and it's an original drawing and in this case the museum bought made an uncalf so they not just got it for free but they provided the sum and he made his comic strip at the beginning of the 1990s and the interesting thing the main character is called Chushi, which stems from the Uruguayan term Chush, used mainly for migrants from former Yugoslavia and Turkey in Austria. And he's a second generation son of labor migrants who came to Austria in the 60s from Turkey and he in this comic he thematizes not just the reality of this protagonist in Austria and also the racism the structural racism and the symbolical racism he is confronted with in everyday life. Not just, and that's so important, was so important for us from the fringes of the right, but also from the middle and from the left. Like the so-called protagonists of multicultural society and proponents of multicultural society. society and proponents of multicultural society. Thank you. May I add something? Because you asked that this is an object and this was ideal for the, I mean, the museum museum collects mainly three-dimensional objects but also photographs and papers for example that are essential to tell the history of migration are not seen as kind of like the ideal material to integrate in their collections. They only collected in the context of larger estates, but we were able to integrate also papers like certificates of work, special IDs that were somehow important for migrants during their stay in Austria, we were able to integrate these papers into the collection. Thank you very much. I just want to mention briefly that of course also questions from the audience are welcome if they're already coming up please just give a sign under here yes yeah thank you I was wondering I think one of the biggest challenges, as we were also listening to the experience of another community archive or informal archive, projects is the economic infrastructure and how they are being possible they become possible because normally these archives are not meant to exist in a way that's why they're not institutional because they are kind of like a grassroot or like they come from a demand that is not coming from where the funding or where the institutional will is deposited no so so I don't know I I was very curious I mean yesterday I mean, yesterday, Marcela and Bertolt were sharing the big effort that was to collect 14 interviews. And now that I was listening to you and you telling us these huge numbers that are very astonishing. I was really wondering how many people work on it, how is this, what makes it possible for an informal archive to exist in such a big dimension and also that it becomes desirable for an institution to acquire it. Because also another problem I think that community archives face is that since they have objects that are not very desirable for museums, as Vida was saying, or they're copies, because also they come from damaged histories, also they come from damaged histories from uh like from from from histories that normally lose this kind of uh materials that museums want uh originals and stuff like that and also so yeah i was i i would be yeah i would like you to maybe share how these archives, what was your experience in the terms of finding support or making them sustainable and make them grow? Thank you. I'm sure all three of us have great stories of desperately looking for money and every once in a while finding at least something. Believe me, I could write books on the subject um the uh as i said before in whether it's archives or art movements when you're going against the grain, then nobody wants what you have. And when I first started going back to Arad in 1999, sitting with people, and I said, that's what needs to be collected, pictures and stories. And as soon as I started looking for money to find this, I got the same answer all over America when I was, because I thought that's where I'd be finding most of the money. And it was Spielberg did it. And I said, no. Spielberg did something wonderful. That's a video project of going to Holocaust survivors and interviewing about the Holocaust. It's extremely important, and they did a great job. And he's got a lot of money. I said, what I'm looking to do is to go to the oldest living Jews, collect their family stories and their pictures, and have them, and create an archive of these stories. And he'd look across at the person, he'd say, yeah, Spielberg did that. I said, no, he didn't. And it was brutal. Where I found my first, the first bit of money came from Austria. And it came from a man, he died in the mid-2000s. His name was Peter Maringer. He was the chef de cabinet in the – you know, they keep changing around ministries like a shell game. So there was, you know, art, culture, and education at one time. It was something – this was under – when it was under Elizabethabeth gare not known for her liberal views by the way um the uh nevertheless her chef de cabinet i said here's what i want to do i want to go to old jews and at least i said the amalaga is there i should the amalaga kawan kawaraj oh and so uh talking to ofalpe peoplepaid people and they like that. And I just said, we want to collect all this. And then he just said, he said, let me see what I can do. And then very soon I was summoned back into some office and they said, he said, we're going to give you at the time was three million shillings. We believe in what you're doing. We believe in all this. And then I went to others and i said they're giving this why don't you match it um and they did uh and then i went to other people so it's all you got to be very very very tough to do this kind of thing uh and it's not fun, but I enjoy the fight because I believe so much in what we do. And I believe in what we've done. Starting in 2006, we actually created a club for the people we interviewed in Vienna and in Budapest. Surely we're the only oral history institute with a social club. And it meets every single month because we still care for these people and their stories. And I visit them. There are not many left in Ukraine, meaning they're just gone. The medical care is not the same. is not the same. So, it's a constant battle for fundraising, and it's trying to convince people that what you're doing is vitally important, and you're never going to get all the money you want. You're never going to get it. I remember when I was first starting just my photography of documenting Jewish life, I was telling somebody about, and I told him a year later, and he said, well, why haven't you started? And I said, well, because I haven't found all the money I need to get moving. And he just burst out laughing. And he just said, oh, you're never going to find that. If you believe in what you're doing, just go and do it. All right. And off I went to Romania. And I'm sure your stories are exactly the same, but with different subjects, verbs, and predicates, but it's basically the same. I mean, you did this because of your passion and the fact that you just didn't want to take no for an answer. Maybe I can elaborate a bit about the Fabi Co. I've been talking a lot about the history and the history that is kept in the archive, but the VBKÖ is a very, very active artist association that is pursuing a queer feminist intersectional agenda and it's taking this very serious. And it's a very caring space. I really appreciate being a member there. And we are trying to extend this caring, so to speak, also to the archive. And we inherited from a form, we inherited this history from a former, from several generations already. And I'm speaking as we, because other members are in the room as well i'm just saying and um uh yeah maybe most importantly is to say that everything is based on volunteer work everything in connection with the archive so far has been voluntarily done done apart from a few funding there and then that enabled us or a then president in the 2000s to hire an archivist to actually order and categorize the material that's there the archive consists of archive publications and artworks actually also and and that was the time when it was actually when the material was made or the documents were trans were categorized as an archive and then was created the so-called fiend book which we are still working with it It's an analog database, let's say, in order to be able to find the holdings. But what is very important to the current members and what the VWKÖ is at the moment is to keep the archive within the association. That's really a main goal because we want to work with it, to be able to work with it also from an artistic perspective and this has been happening already. I mean, our project is just one of many that is dealing with the archive from that is investing artistic research into the archive and we want to continue that and we want to continue especially with a also decolonial methodology with the archive because as I said before there is also a very violent aspect to it as well. And we want to create more visibility for the archive at the same time. So we want to be able to work with it to have the archive body close to us still. And I maybe have to say that the archive is also situated in the same space as the association since 1912. So it's really a body, the space is a body for us as well. But what we are aiming at, and there have been several attempts already, to digitalize the archive. And we are now for the third time applying for funding to do that, to not only enable us to work with it, they were asking for it or they were proposing to take it over, but we don't want that. We want to keep it a living archive because we are not only dealing with historical material, we also in the moment of creating our own archive at the moment. I mean, as I said, it's now a very different agenda, maybe from the beginning, from the foundation. And this should be also inscribed into the archive, especially, for example, migrating stories from current members. And so this is our goal, to keep it in the association, to be able to work with it and maybe to literally fill gaps also of objects that we actually know that are missing from our archive but maybe are visible in other archives to connect through the digitalization and the database. So this is, yeah. Well, mine is different. It was not an archival project. It was not a, I mean, it was a project that had a beginning and an end. And in the end, around 750 objects, documents were integrated into the collection of the city. We didn't, at the end there was no exhibition, which is unusual. Usually museums make exhibitions on the topic and thereafter objects or materials are integrated into the collections. But in this case it was the opposite. So it was a challenge for us because we couldn't give back anything to the donors. We couldn't guarantee that their things would be seen at some point, would be presented at some point to the public. So therefore therefore we decided to make a book and fortunately I forgot it at home. It was published at the end of the project. It's called Schere, Topf, Papier, Objekte zur Migrationsgeschichte and it was published in 2016 in the Mandelbaum Verlag and it contains a reflection on the project, our reflection on the project, on the whole process on the challenges and also the failures and it contains a lot of a selection of objects and materials that we gathered with stories that we created. Because we wanted to give back something to the donors. And at the end, the museum decided to make an exhibition. A year later, that was this Geteilte Geschichte. It was not realized by the project team but it was realized by a curator from the museum Gerhard Milcham and myself I was assigned a job thereafter in the museum for a year actually another collecting project on the refugees of former Yugoslavia that came to Austria, that came to Vienna in the 1990s. This project was not realized for several reasons. For several reasons, I could talk about this at another occasion. But actually my task was then to do this to prepare this exhibition that was on display in the autumn 2017 and yeah so this was actually the visible result of the more prominent result of the collecting project. And a huge success, I would say, or at least this was some kind of recognition for the donors. And what we did, what we didn't do within the book, and what we couldn't do in the database so we tried to integrate as much information as possible that we have concerning the single objects so that future curators can kind of get well informed and to avoid decontextualization of the objects which often happens and then the idea behind the exhibition was to kind of put the individual memories and stories of single protagonists into the forefront. So we created nine video interviews with donors. And I don't know if we have time to just quickly play. It's not the final version. The videos were directed by Karin Berger, the filmmaker Karin Berger. And each of the nine protagonists shows starts with her object like it has an object and tells the story of this object and what it means to him or her but it also points to broader aspects of the whole history so maybe we have time to just points to broader aspects of the whole history. So maybe we have time to just play the first two minutes or so of the video. The protagonist is Ali Gedik, he's an activist, and he also participated already in the exhibition project G Gastarbeiteri, we showed his, we presented his personal archive consisting of leaflets of media reports that he gathered, that he had assembled in the 1980s and 1990s as a political activist in Vorarlberg. And this is a, he talks now about the audio tapes that he used to correspond with his die er mit seinen Familienmitgliedern in der Türkei verabschieden musste. Die Sehnsucht in diesen eineinhalb Jahren, in den ersten Jahren, war extrem groß. Mit Briefen natürlich, durch einen Brief kriegst du auch etwas, wie es ihnen geht und was sie machen, wie die Situation ist und so weiter. Aber durch die Stimme, ich kriege jetzt schon Gänsehaut, durch die Stimme ist mehr da. Du hast das Gefühl, die Mutter steht vor dir. Und eben die erste Kassette hat sehr viel ausgewirkt. Das war wirklich sehr stark. Überhaupt die Stimme der Geschwister, die im Hintergrund herum geschrien haben. Und es war immer so, überhaupt in den Anfangsphasen, wenn zum Beispiel die Familie Gedick für mich, für meinen Onkel, also wenn dann eine Kassette aufgenommen wurde, dann hieß es halt, ja, wir nehmen eine Kassette auf. Dann sind auch die Nachbarschaft eingeladen worden, die Tante Aische, der Onkel Mehmet, der Onkel Salman. Die Nachbarschaft eingeladen worden, die Tante Ayshe, der Onkel Mehmet, der Onkel Salman, die Nachbarschaft wurden dann zu uns eingeladen. Also im Hintergrund hast du dann schon alle gehört, ja von mir auch Grüße und hallo Ali, wie geht es dir und so. So wie heute, wenn du irgendwie eine Videoaufnahme machst oder live irgendwie per Handy erfährst. Und das war halt damals natürlich der Höhepunkt, die Stimme zu hören. Die Stimme fast der ganze Bewohner im Dorf. mir jetzt eingefallen, dass wir oft, wenn wir so quasi über die politische Situation etwas befragen wollten, dann haben wir, so wie die Kassette, die ich jetzt gehalten habe, irgendeine Kassette von irgendeinem Sänger haben wir genommen und die Anfangs und Ende haben wir die Musik gelassen, ob das so eine Musikkassette wäre. Und so haben wir dann drauf gesprochen und weggeschickt. Das heißt, wenn ich die Kassette hergenommen habe und mit der Familie sprechen wollte im Vorarlberg, dann habe ich die ersten paar Minuten einfach laufen lassen, also ganz normale Musik. Und dann habe ich drauf gesprochen. lassen, also ganz normale Musik und dann habe ich darauf gesprochen und wir haben immer geglaubt, wenn wir irgendwo in der Mitte in der Kassette irgendwelche politische Dinge ansprechen, werden sie eh nicht drauf kommen und so weiter. Das waren da einfache Überlegungen. Meine Mutter konnte nicht anders und sie hat immer auf den Kassetten natürlich auf Kurdisch gesprochen und es war halt voller Risiko natürlich, obwohl sie nicht politisches gesprochen hat, aber dadurch, dass sie nur kurdisch gesprochen hat, hatten wir immer Angst, dass irgendetwas unten da mit ihnen passiert. Und da war immer so eine Auf und Ab natürlich. May I add something to this? This is one of the few objects that, I mean, the Wien Museum reopened a couple of months ago and has created a new permanent exhibition. is presented in this new permanent exhibition unfortunately without his story unfortunately without this i mean this whole complex this many layers of history that are uh integrated or that are kind of um hidden in this music cassette so we just see uh this music set on display which is really a pity and another thing maybe to if I can add they also show this tea that is produced by a Vienna based company called Orient the tea brand is called Karadeniz stemming from a region at black sea in turkey and the interesting thing this was one of our first uh objects that we uh suggested to the museum the interesting thing about this tea is that it it is uh it is yeah it is branded sold as a Turkish product, original Turkish product but it is actually produced in Sri Lanka by this Viennese company and many migrants who live in Vienna bring it back to their relatives in Turkey because it's such a good tea and in the new exhibition in Vienna it's just I mean there's this short note on the on the tea and I think if I remember right there's just this sense of well it's one of this you know this it's a Turkish product and it it is consumed by many migrants in Vienna and yeah so also stripped of the many layers of its the tea cardines I don't know if it's yeah yes yes exactly exactly so I mean that's kind of like the yeah it's this is an outcome of a transient a transient I mean a vergängliches Projekt. I mean, it was like four year and a half and none of the members of the team is working, you know, in the museum. And, yeah. But at the same time, sorry, the claims for an archive or a museum of migration continue. So maybe it's also also this could also be seen as a kind of a small piece in a larger of course struggle i mean i'm not involved in this current group called museum of migration but they are promoting this kind of idea of a museum since a couple of years but in other parts of Austria there are things have changed for example there is this documentation center of migration in Innsbruck and it's structurally based at ZEMIT, which is a counseling service for migrants since the 1980s. So they have the former secretary of chief had this together with others. And also as an outcome of this campaign for an archive of migration they created this archive now that is based in a still running counseling service and I think this is an advantage because they are in direct contact with their clients and they realize that this is the way they give something they get something so it's kind of reciprocally and and in this project was not reciprocally of only for a few who whose objects are now in the dig I mean some are in the digital collection of the museum online available but um i mean that's what uh yesterday um marcella and bertholdt they talked about vienna chile and it was completely different i mean set up and and allison i think there was a question i was going to make that statement it's more an observation than a question. I was going to make that statement. It's more an observation than a question, but I'm not going to make that statement because people then ramble on for hours. No, the point was this is such a fantastic example of how museums kill archives. And I say that having been trained in the V&A and from a museum design history background. I mean, I think these three days are really about how important archives as active, living, reciprocal agents are. And this kind of obsession with the three-dimensional objects and ticking boxes to include a migratory object. And that's what I, the broader point I wanted to make was perhaps we're at the kind of exciting end of archival discourse because so much of it now certainly within art and design and I don't and I think more broadly is also the commodification of archives as political and cultural capital and what you've described is the importance of the museum having these objects for political capital. You know, it's generally seen as a liberal museum, I think, but actually the voices have been silenced in that process. And I just wondered, yeah wondered what the speakers thought about the kind of rise of the archive as political and commodification kind of capital. Certainly with an architecture, architectural collections are now being auctioned for millions in some cases. The design collection that I oversee, I'm director of the Papanak Foundation, which is, Papanak was an Austrian Jewish emigre. And this was a purchased archive because the University of Applied Arts wanted to kind of make amends, shall we say, and reappropriate the people it had expelled in a very, you know, overtly political act, actually. So it serves the university well, because they now have a Jewish emigre archive. And, but also, so I think this also radical histories are very commodifiable. So I don't think it's just about like great architects are worth lots of money. Actual radical history archive, archives are worth a lot in terms of political cultural capital. And so I was just thinking about that broader economy. On the one one end you've got like you say volunteers the same with my archive we've got people who volunteer to do oral histories around design so you've got the kind of uh amateur historical and passionate labor that's involved in creating those archives and on the other end of that spectrum you've got the the economy of the archive in a broader sense. Sorry, that was a ramble. I just did that really... University? University of Applied Arts. In? In Vienna. Okay. But I'm British, as you can probably tell, yeah. I'm an interloper, yes. So, yeah, I wondered what you thought about... Yeah, just the broader economy of... I'll make a couple of statements and also going back to George's point. I started this, I started Centropa's archive specifically with the goal of preserving Jewish memory and the lands where it had been all but wiped out. There's nobody left. There were three Jews we found in North Macedonia who remembered the Sephardic world of the Balkans and nobody else. There was actually a fourth, but she didn't like the other three, so she wasn't going to talk to us. We go through that all the time. And so, you know, making sure that we got that's my goal was to do this. The other goal is different from yours is I have about 15 people who work for Centropa, none of whom were involved with the interviewing. When we were doing our interviewing between 2000 and 2009, I was running around begging for money. We had 140 people working for us and all of them, and I hate to say it because it's not nice, but I always say, a volunteer is worth what you pay them. And that's an ugly thing to say, because it's simply not true. But when you're doing an interview with somebody, you have a volunteer, you have volunteers who like to go and interview someone or do something but then when you take it to when they take their interview to an historian and the historian says now go back and ask these 10 questions and they go i didn't sign up for that you know i don't want to get embarrassed and then they you know so therefore we we just protected our in our particular way of doing things, everybody had to get paid. Because then I could beat them up. And I could say, you need to do this. And we had a layer of historians who would review everything. My goal was to make sure this stuff, first of all, got done because nobody was doing it like we did. That's number one. Number two, the other thing that I wanted to see is that this archive would live longer than me. I said that we had a lot of people who work. We have a lot of people who work for Centropa now. They had nothing to do with the oral histories. So I'm at an advanced age. I'm not going to be around that much longer. And I want to make sure that this archive has the best possible future home and that it will have people who will actually use it and it will be in a place online that everybody can find it. Now, about a quarter of a million people come to our archive every year. And we have a lot of PhD students and MA students who are always asking for the original language transcripts, and that's great. But what I wanted to make sure that was done is that they'd find things. The U.S. Holocaust Museum gets 24 million people a year who come to their archive. That's where I want our archive to to live at a place where it will be seen. And besides, they paid money, which helped me pay back some of the debts that I incurred to make this happen. To go to your question that you had said, when we first started, as I said, nobody really wanted what we were doing. Nobody understood it. Because everybody was thinking, you need to do it on video, you need to talk about the Holocaust. And I said, no, it's much more different than that. It was, and I had an email to people at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 2003, and I always send this to them. And the subject line in my email was, it's time for our annual do nothing meeting. And I would joke with him. He says, every year I come to see you, every year you say Centropa's idea is brilliant, and then you don't do anything. And then I would send that same email every year, and we would meet, and nothing happened. Until enough academics in different countries, in Italy, in Turkey, in Greece, in the United States, at big prestigious universities, at Harvard, at Stanford, were using the Centropa archive. And finally, the lights went on for them. And believe me, I'm saying nothing bad about museums like the Wien Museum. It's always, every museum is, what you see on the walls is a compromise. It's a compromise between the academics, the historians, be a place for this because I think the story of immigration in Austria is vitally important and I wish all the luck in the world with it hope that said something yeah that's a complicated question but maybe I start with my perspective coming from art history and like really being obsessed and working in an institution that has been really obsessed with its own archive and its own historization, let's say. let's say. Coming from that I was then really fascinated and I just realized that artistic research approach to archives is so much more productive from my perspective at least and I mean, we had the archival turn in art and it became a popular practice. And I'm convinced that post-colonial theory now is really very productively informing artists' approach to archives. And I just see so much more critical potential in that, in this critical approach to the archive within artistic research or artistic practices compared to academia and historians' practices. And I'm so much now with the Fabrik Hauy Archive and I'm already told I'm totally haunted by this image, for example, by this photograph of the group of members from the 30s. And I'm obsessed with this photograph, but have not been doing very professional research. but have not been doing very professional research, maybe it's also very much my projection onto it and a certain desire and speculation about the people on the photograph. But yeah, as I said before, it's for the VKÖ, it's really important to keep the archive within the association and keeping it as a material to work with and to reflect about their own position, situatedness, and own history and to keep it alive in that sense. And so I think, I mean, that's bringing us also into the dilemma that we are lacking funding, of course, and that everything is going very slow. of course and that everything is going very slow I mean there has been scientific research about it from US American scholars and they published and it's not being read in Austria eventually. At least that's what we witness. And on the other hand there are these institutions, these great museums, research centers that show a great interest in the archive, but I'm totally sure that the archive would be kind of petrified and would just be one of many archives in this big collection. And so we are doing it the tough way maybe, but I think at least for us it's really important to keep it there. Can you expand a little bit on you mentioned artistic research and post-colonial theories as a productive way of confronting the archive or dealing with the archive in a way can you archive or dealing with the archive in a way can you say a little bit more about what you were working with what kind of approaches and maybe we can then also take a look at the video or a little piece of the video you brought yeah the the project that i have been talking about in the beginning is really just one of many takes on the archive. It's by Stephanie and me. And we were very much informed by Saidiya Hartman's approach of critical fabulation to the archive, to the archive, who is coming from African American studies and who is when researching invisible subjects, so to speak, in the archive, she's suggesting to represent them or to make them visible, to give them a voice through fiction. And that coming from an that coming from a historian we we of course found that very productive and i mean many other artists are too i think taking this up um so we were trying to create or not me because i'm not the artist but the group of artists who was involved in the exhibition and in the project, were trying or had this approach of bringing in fictional material into the archive to maybe really hint at gaps, literally. And the other, let's say, position that was very important for us was a British filmmaker, Onyeka Iqvö, who also gave a workshop to us and who established for her practice in dealing with the colonial film archive, the British colonial film archive, the methodology of, she called it critical proximity, where she is really thinking of the archive as a body and her body kind of getting close and being in the archive and encountering the archive. And so these two aspects of, there are many out there, of course, were informed our research and our project to a great extent. And we invited artists who share this methodology or similar approaches like Belinda Kasem Kaminski. I really also want to mention Sköggel, the Sekretariat für Geister- und Archivpolitiken by Julia Wieger and Nina Höchtl, who have been much earlier than me dealing with the archive of the VBKÖ and realized a really great film project, Hauntings in the Archive, where they also dived into great gaps in the archive and how they are, and how, for example, the specters that are haunting us kind of in the archive and how this continuation of the national socialism was going on in in in the VBKU in the association with its members after the war and yeah and then the students who were involved they really looked at specific objects from the archive that then they dealt with or in a very also speculative approach and yeah but as I said this was just one project and the the video of which we see is still here was really a collective endeavor by members from the VBKÖ. The VBKÖ was invited to take part at an exhibition at the MoOMOC in 2022 called Collaborations. and VBKÖ was invited to contribute on several levels to conceive a accompanying program and a performance program and film program, but we also were able to produce a video that was shown in the exhibition where we would as a collective activate the material from the archive and kind of also bodily engage with material from the archive and connect it to the present and to the current approach of the association identification of the association and yeah maybe Wir sind die eigentlichen Begriffe der Begriffe der Begriffe der Begriffe. Vielleicht können wir ein Schnitt davon spielen. Es sind etwa zwei Minuten. Es war genannt, Wer bringt den Kuchen? Wie engagiert man sich, lesen und arbeiten mit dem, was nicht da ist? Also, wer sind wir? So, who are we? Wir als Frauenvereinigung, die seit 1910 besteht, verstehen uns heute, Sexualität und Ethnizität sowie Rasse diskriminiert hat. Wir können die Vergangenheit nicht ungeschehen machen. Aber wir können offen zugeben, dass nicht wieder gut zu machende Ungerechtigkeiten geschehen sind. dass nicht wieder gut zu machende Ungerechtigkeiten geschehen sind. Wir als Vereinigung und alle zukünftigen MitgliederInnen der VBKÖ tragen somit die gleiche Verantwortung als Gruppe und als Individuen, um auf eine Zukunft hinzuarbeiten, in der wir sicherstellen können, dass sich dies nie wieder wiederholt. Aus diesem Selbstverständnis heraus handelt die VBKÖ aktiv für das Empowerment von Gender und Frauen. Deshalb sind MitgliederInnen, LiebhaberInnen, EhrenmitgliederInnen, der Vorstand und der Beirat der VBKÖ, Vereinigung bildender KünstlerInnen Österreichs, verpflichtet, sich mit dem Addendum der folgenden feministischen Prinzipien zu identifizieren. might perhaps be 200 years old. This would be a mere 88 years from now, another lifetime of another generation passing. For now, we have these...... und agieren nach antidiskriminatorischen, antiklassistischen und antirassistischen Prinzipien. in denen die VBKÖ Personen aufgrund unterschiedlicher Religion, Klasse, Geschlecht, Sexualität und Ethnizität sowie Rasse diskriminiert hat. Da nach meiner Überzeugung die individuelle Frauenkunst als solche heute in Wien noch nicht ausgesprochen entwickelt ist, um als selbstständige Vereinigung aufzutreten. Im Prinzip ihrer Idee außerordentlich sympathisch gegenüberstehend, tut es mir leid, mit meiner Überzeugung verneinend handeln zu müssen. Doch da sie den Glauben haben, so kann ich nur wünschen, dass ich mich irre und sie recht behalten und wünsche das Beste ihrem idealen Wunsche zur guten Tat, indem ich hoffe, dass sie persönlich mir mein überzeugungstreues Handeln nicht übel nehmen. Mit besten Grüßen, Emma Schlangenhauser. Wir dulden keine physische Gewalt in jedweder Form, einschließlich der Verwendung von verletzender und rassistischer Sprache sowie emotionalem Missbrauch. oh sorry this also led to a durational performance with members from the fabricary reading objects from the archive within the exhibition at mumok lena i have i think two questions now um to Georgia. And the first is that I think the difference to the other two projects is very much that you already had an archive, right? You're not the one kind of building it in a way because it's already there. We are also building it. Yeah, but in a very different way, right? It's something very, because you're not taking something, it's internal, but in a very different way, right? It's something very, because you're not taking something, it's internal, let's say. You're part of the institution in which that archive is embedded. But you were talking about that they come, you paid an archival person to come and categorize and I was wondering what kind of agreements you had with that person in terms of how to categorize and I was wondering what kind of agreements you had with that person in terms of how to categorize and now the second question that I had from the video disappeared but maybe it will come up again. I cannot give so many details about that because that was with former president rodolfine lachner who like was taking over the presidents in the 90s as the first person of a let's say younger generation then and who would also then pursue a feminist agenda again or implement a feminist agenda after a time when vbk in the, 70s, 80s and 90s was almost a private thing, Liebhaberei, but just a few members who would use the space of the Fabike Oeh as their studios. And she was then brought in and she actually brought together all the material, the documents as an archive and hired this archivist from Berlin then to find a systematization for the material that's there and that's all that I can tell you about it unfortunately because I have not been able to talk to her about her about that and to about her motivation to do that i can only say she's an artist but she's also an art historian and she had a very um historian's approach also to the archive and to the material and to the association so this was surely informed by her um art history studies i assume and then then but maybe, sorry I would like to add one thing to that. Of course the archive as a tool or the feminist archive also plays of course a very important role for the feminist movement. And I think she was very well connected also with other archives in that sense and had this in her mind, I assume. And I think, I mean, you described it and it was also in the video very prominently, this addendum. And I was wondering if you could reflect a little bit about the role of an association that is funded because of gender questions, but also because of a certain work that you do, right? It's a fach association a association somehow right it's artists come together and and the political agenda that goes beyond that which is something that I read or that like how to say I mean the history of my great grandmother has a lot to do with the association for midwives and it was run by her as a convinced national socialist and she I mean she created this association, she rebuilt the whole association with her ideals and I mean I'm not comparing this at all but I'm still wondering of the role of these kind of associations in terms of ideological conviction because the addendum and that's what I reacted to it says that any member has to comply completely and without hesitation I would put it something like that in English to these ideals that are in the addendum right? Maybe I start with the historical aspect as well. As I said before, the VWKÖ was by no means had a political agenda at that time. And they were also not connected to the women's movement of that time or to any kind of workers' movement. It was an elitist project but they realized that they need to network or to get together in order to fight for their agenda but I mean for example there had been great fights about the vision of art within the association, which led fairly early already to several splittings. For example, there was the group of the fine art, mainly painters and sculptors, women artists that were also very much lobbying for being able to enter the academy and then there was the group of more applied artists many women who were part of the wiener werkstätten and who maybe had more an idea of a gesamtkunstwerk in mind and were also interested in design etc and eventually they split from the vbko in 26 and established the so-called wiener frauenkunst so there was a rupture going through the members at that time already and so that's yeah and then the second big rupture um eventually happened in 38 of course when uh the gleichschaltung happened and many associations were um um how do you say um closed yes and because they were having too many jewish members um like the Wiener Frauenkunst was then convicted, do you say? And reintegrated into the VBKÖ and the VBKÖ was expelling its Jewish members. We know that they had to leave, but for there is no note of course telling the members to leave but we have this register where they are crossed out and then we know that Stephanie Hollenstein took over the association she was before part of the Wiener Frauenkunst and then she became president of the VBKU and she was very close to the Reichskulturkammer and interesting figure of the VBKU and she was very close to the Reiskulturkammer. And interesting figure, a daughter from a farm in Vorarlberg, who was kind of found and then sent to the, or she was drawing, she was, how do you say, indicted, she discovered, thank you, when she was drawing while being with the cows, and then was sent off to Munich to the academy where she was taken in immediately as a woman, and then established her own drawing and painting school, and went to the first world war dressed as a man which she was then discovered, this was discovered but she could stay as a war reporter, painting, war painter and she then later moved to Vienna, lived in an openly lesbian relationship all her life and was a flaming national socialist. And yeah, took over the VBKÖ and really pursued a political agenda with that. And she also, her correspondence with the Reichskulturkammer, et cetera, everything is in the archive. I mean, there are big gaps for sure, but it's really a singular position for the archive that this Gleichschaltung is so well documented and not deleted or erased, so to speak. Yes, so we have this history this problematic history and we are very much aware of it or trying to make ourselves more aware of it and deal with it and this sort of this addendum was initiated by the, not current board, but by the board before, which was the first POC board that the association ever had. And it was very important to them to, we still had these statutes from these historical statutes in the archive, and it was very important to them to activate and actualize them. And so they were writing this new addendum to the original statutes. And yes, I think the political agenda is a very clear one at the moment. I'm looking back because members of the board are also present who have been writing this addendum. There was another question in the audience. Can I quickly have a response? It's very short. I'm sorry, I'm very short. Just as an example, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but just as another example in another association and part of the working group for the intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust. And there's a big discussion within the members if it should become a more politically outspoken association here to the left, right? And I'm one of those who are against doing that because I believe within this specific association, it's very important that we keep it open to all kinds of political views as long as they are not on the right extreme, obviously, but nobody would enter that working group anyway. But of course, there are liberals, there are social democrats, there are Christian CDU members, all kinds of political members or people who are not members of any political party. And that enables a dialogue that goes beyond political question, but that really looks at what it's about within that association. I mean, I think that simply the members got much more diverse in recent years, so we are not only white anymore, luckily, we are not only white anymore, luckily, and there are so many migrating stories also within the VBKÖ, and yeah, this should be made visible and appreciated, and yes. I think Alison had another question. Hi, yeah, I just wanted to ask the question about Edward and Vida have talked about the opening up of archival resources to facilitate them. How much does artistic practice close archives down or create them as more elitist entities a 40-minute film it's great for an already converted audience not sorry i'm not i'm just using your example i'm not i didn't mean to just use your example i is that a concern that artistic practice makes things overly subjective in classic Bourdieuian sense? You know, people who have access to art and artistic venues are generally elitist audiences. Is that a concern? And also, do we need to think critically about why artistic practice has arisen in terms of its relationship to the archive in terms of the economy of higher education and that universities of applied arts and art schools have had to justify their role by making themselves scientific and therefore using the archive and do we need to think critically about that perspective in artistic practice and its relation to archives? I mean, we are an artist association, Women Artists Association, so most of the members have an artistic practice. And yeah, I know. I mean yeah I mean we have discussed this or we are discussing this a lot within the association and we are aware that we are also very elitist in the sense of that most of us had an education and were educated in this specific field and it's a privilege to be able also it's a privilege to be able to work for free I mean you need to be able to work for free and volunteer for an association and an archive. And we are very much aware of that, that we are also privileged. But we are also trying to support people who are maybe from third, not EU citizens, for example, to support them to be able to get a job or to help them to, so there is a, let's say, there is a bit of activistic work able to get a job or to help them to... So there is a bit of activistic work or community work also coming along with the VWKÖ and how it's dealing with its members and how it's trying to care of or to consider certain living situations of its members. I mean, we were invited by a museum to contribute to an exhibition within the museum context, and so that's what we did with this video. And it was simply important to us to bring in certain aspects and to speak out about aspects that are important to the association and to introduce the archive and the history of the VBKÖ to a broader audience outside of the VBKÖ and the MoMOK is already a broader audience for us. And to use this space, this visibility to make it more public and to also inscribe it into maybe a public memory of Austria, which it has not been inscribed into. But yes, it's a dilemma that we are facing with artistic research, that's for sure, yes. We have been taking a look at examples from how you dealt with the archive and examples from the exhibition. Maybe we can take a brief look at Centropa's website. Centropa.org Because I was wondering one of the aims of Centropa was specifically speaking to elderly Jewish people, and many of those have been passing away, you already mentioned. So has this changed your way of working the archive? Oh, no. I mean, when you interview people who are 90 years old 20 years ago you figured they're not going to be around i'm sorry when you interview people who are in their 90s you figure they're not going to be around much longer um the um that's the you can probably get rid of that um i would just say um about um about our job as an archive was to first to get the stories. We rushed to get the stories because we interviewed in ways people never did before. So if you go back up, let's say, would you, we have different sites in different languages. Would you go to the English? I might be able to find that a little easier. And then let's see, films and culture. Go to podcast, let's say. The question is having the archive and then what you can do with it. And then also, we're completely open source. People can use the archive in any way they wish. And we find that very exciting. The four areas that we want to be working on ourselves right now, once we have the archive, are podcasts, which we'll look at here, but I'll come back to. And it would be so helpful if I could read my own handwriting. And then it's exhibitions that we make from the archive. And I'll say something about that. And then there's also stage presentations that you can make by having readings from the archive that you can turn that over to other people to do, which we've done in Los Angeles, for instance, and other places. So you always want to do stage readings in Los Angeles because there's lots of out-of-work actors who can work very cheaply. So that made it even better. And there's some other things on here I can't really read, but thematic websites I suppose the podcast though I'll just tell you is let's say you have your stories from let's go down keep going down to season I think three to a little bit more to that oh no sorry that's Ukraine one more to Austria so this and you click on uh listen to season two uh and what we did is we um we interviewed about 77 people here in uh in austria all of them in vienna uh and then what we did is we took their stories, and if we scroll down a little more, and there's my introduction, and then you can stop there, let's say. And then what we did is we took their stories and asked and went into the archive. None of them were still alive two years ago, these people, when we did this. One was alive, but she wasn't, Campos Mentos. And what we did is we edited the stories down to have the part about their experience with the Kindertransport being taken out of Austria. So that's what we have with Lili Tauber. And then, because all of the interviews were done in German, we went to actors. We didn't use the original voices because usually someone had a really bad tape recorder. We weren't that smart to think that we were going to do this kind of thing later. But we hired actors from the theater and the josephstadt uh to do the readings from them uh and then from london it was again um you can always find someone from the royal shakespeare company um and you can pay them incredible they're so happy to have work um it's not that they're starving it's just that that they like – most of the people who did our readings for us in London were in their mid-80s. I have someone who's 90 years old who's going to do a reading for us from a Vienna story next week, Dame Janet Sussman, who is one of the great Royal Shakespeare Company actresses. great Royal Shakespeare Company actresses. So I think podcasting is a wonderful way to use your archive. Now, when I say podcasting, you and I probably, or most people think of podcast as two people sitting around a table talking. I don't see podcasts like that at all. I'm very much a BBC Four fan. So what I see a podcast is a a mini documentary um there's my introduction uh and then you have some music and it fades and then you have an act why don't we listen to um uh let's go to uh to let's just go to this one, go to episode. And let's see if it works. And then let's play and see what happens. And then it'll be my introduction. In our first two episodes, we heard from Sophie Hearn and Kitty Sushny, both of whom grew up in the center of Vienna. Not so with our next interviewee, Lily Tauber. Back then, she was Lily Shisha. And she will tell us about growing up in a small town in Austria. My parents lived in two villages in the province of Lower Austria. My dad came from Grodnitz and my mother from Prine-under-Rax. Back then, at the turn of the century, they would have these events for young Jews to meet other young Jews. And in 1908, my father, Wilhelm Schischke, met my mother, Johanna Friedman, at a Purim party. The very next day, my father rode his horse and buggy to my mother's house, and a few months later, they were married. You can kill it. So the idea is, these are stories. These are wonderful stories that people have told us. And by the way, a video interview project with Holocaust survivors about the Holocaust isn't going to give you that. And we go all the way with her growing up. And then, of course, Reichspogromnacht, et cetera, et cetera. And then her parents taking her to the train station and Westbahnhof at the time. Norfolk, where a wealthy aristocrat felt that she should do something for Jewish girls and gave them a house and even ordered in their kosher food. All of that's in there. In the meantime, her parents were sent by their neighbors to a ghetto in German-occupied Poland where they were basically almost starved to death. And then when they didn't die, they took them to either Sobibor or Belzec. We don't know which death camp they went. Then she comes back to Vienna, though. And then she tells her story of raising her family and meeting her husband. And it takes us all the way up to 2005. So that's one thing you can do with an archive. The other that we won't go into are the things that we've done. For instance, if you go to Krakow, there's the Galicia Jewish Museum, and in a room about this size, there's giant, it's an exhibition called Ten Polish Cities, Ten Jewish Stories. And it's one person. Polish cities, 10 Jewish stories. And it's one person. Not that it matters to you, but Teofila Silbering from Krakow. There's pictures of her childhood. Then there's pictures of what she went through during the war and her life after the war. And the audio is in four languages. It's all her words, and you have four actresses reading it in Hebrew, German, Polish, and English. And you have one for each city, each of these 10 cities. So that's something else that you can do. So I'd just like to, I believe what you want to do is to stay as open source as possible so that you can do different things with it. Andrea had a question here in the audience. Yeah, I was thinking about this home for the archives, And I had been working with a feminist, like a community of or donations of many women that participated in the mobilizations. And then after 20, 30 years or something, some academics managed to get a university to sort of get hold of it. And now the contradiction is that while the archive is... So now she doesn't have to carry the burden of sustaining it, taking care of it, making it accessible to other people that want to see it and everything. But then, for example, I was writing an article about the archive and we wanted to include pictures and just the process of dealing with the university's bureaucracy made it impossible to actually, in a text that I was writing with her, that she was the owner of the archive, to include pictures of her own archive. So it was quite unsettling. I mean, fortunately she didn't give up all the material to the university, so we included pictures that she kept with her. And in the end, the photos of the article do not include photos of the archive while the article is talking about the archive, which is interesting because while you think that giving it to an institution makes it more accessible it yeah like it not necessarily because sometimes institutions are victims of their own bureaucracies because the the the the library that hosts this archive they were very they have a lot of will of giving this but then the university copyright blah blah department were like really a pain in the ass and they were really blocking this uh this initiative so so just uh like it just it becomes very alienating like it becomes like a quite alienating processes and and also like a like a big there's a big ambivalence or what what does it mean to make it more accessible and to whom also I would not have access to this archive if I wouldn't have an a credential of a PhD student so maybe another an activist a feminist activist that do not have the credential that I have would not be, would not have access to these archives. So only academics and not necessarily the communities that these archives speak to have access to these materials. No. So, so, so I was also, yeah, thinking about that, about the home of the archive and what which is the most accessible uh which i i'm not saying that uh the also anna victoria who was the one who made the archive was also the most accessible but will not that's also difficult because she didn't have like an infrastructure to receive people to so that i'm not saying that that's the solution but i'm just like trying to point to this kind of uh yeah challenge of finding the most accessible uh way of a home and yeah and I just want to comment on Alison's remark I was just thinking about it and connecting to what you were saying uh before like I was thinking if maybe artistic research does not like does not necessarily like it informed you were just saying it previously and I was thinking like how it it becomes like a like like a way that an approach to the archives that should or ideally would inform historians should or ideally would inform historians on how to work differently or on the problems of making archives, no? And not necessarily doing archives. Or so it's more like a practice, as I see it, of like putting the finger like in the contradictions of the archive and how historians and archivists can actually approach to their archive making in a different way. I want to say briefly, because both of you have had your experiences and it sounds like you're very protective of what you have, and rightly so. In our case, we solved that problem by selling the archive. By the way, in none of the documents from the Holocaust Museum did they use the word sell. It's always acquire. I'm happy to use the word. But what we did with them is that the condition was that Centropa had to be licensed to do whatever we wanted to do with the archive. We can't sell anything, which we didn't really do anyway, but they felt that was important. And actually, they give away everything for free. So they're very good. But the point is that we can continue using the archive in any way we want. Therefore, we know what bureaucracies at an organization that big would be a nightmare. They don't cooperate with us on anything. They have research departments. They have research departments, they have educational departments, both domestic in the United States and foreign. They don't talk to us. None of those departments. They will do whatever they want with the archive. We will do whatever we want. And on every page of the contract, it had to say there will be no reference that Centropa and the u.s holocaust museum cooperate with each other um which is fine which is fine i'm thrilled with the with the result the um uh in in regards to the politicization thank you uh and it's my native language uh the uh that's uh that is a problem um uh in the sense that we are now we made an exhibition based on our ukrainian stories uh and it's a big traveling exhibition there's such a hunger in ukraine to learn about the their jewish history uh that it's it's like nowhere else i've ever worked um we made an exhibition on big panels, roll-up panels on different themes, at work, at home, at school. And then there's a section on the Holodomor and evacuation to Central Asia during the war. And then Jewish men and Jewish women in the Soviet army during the war. The exhibition was requested when we launched it in 2016, by 79 schools. That's more than all the other countries combined. We managed to get it to 33 of them before COVID shut it down, and then it fell apart. So now we're resurrecting it. But to go to the politicization of the exhibition, you can't put an exhibition out on Ukraine today showing Jews or anybody else fighting for the Red Army, the Soviet Army, during the Second World War. They don't want to hear it. It's not that they're denying it. It's that they don't want they don't want it on the walls so and and i've just done a series of articles uh for tablet magazine very right wing uh uh on on jewish writers in ukraine and i did one on isaac babel by going to uh odessa but he wrote in russian nobody wants to read him, etc., etc. So the politicization, especially in a war zone, is something very special. But you both have had your experiences and you're very protective and rightly so and I'm sure you've got something to say about that. I mean, during the research, I, on several occasions, made the encounter. I realized that actually archival theory and archival practice don't go together most of the time at all. And maybe I can give a little gossip detail regarding this catalog that is officially published by the secession, we approached a research center in Vienna about and requested to maybe change the entry in the database on the fact that it's actually a VauWiKaYu exhibition. And this was done with the help of a curator there and so on. And the response from the archivist was that it's not possible to change facts based on ideology. Yes. So, yeah. And the other experience that I made was with the students dealing with archives was also very interesting because we also went to the Angewandte archives several times and to the collection and they really were very welcoming and helped us and showed us around and everyone was very fascinated but in the end to the students it felt like it was not as accessible to them so they all stopped working with the Angewandte archive and turned to the VWKU archive because it was so much easier for them to to access it of course through me because I'm in this specific position but it was interesting to witness that too. Alison. Thank you. Yeah, there's always this, sorry, speaking on behalf of, I'm not an archivist, I have to declare, but so I'm a user of archives, also use it with different groups, like socially different groups, Jewish history groups or students. But there's one thing I have to say in defense of the kind of slightly pedantic archivist is that material is there as heritage. It has to be protected and it legally is protected. has to be protected and it legally is protected so there are kind of levels and it's very expensive keeping an archive as that's that and making it available is very expensive that's one of the and on copyright this is a nightmare but the problem is when uh universities don't make up copyright law that's part of a broader capitalist you know economy of visuals and they cannot be held liable for the misuse of an artist's work and I think there's probably a lot of artists in the room that might be sensitive to the misappropriation of their own material so it's always a really difficult one and so sometimes archivists come over as very establishment but unfortunately the kind of that is sometimes also their their role and it's yeah it's also care work and they're taking it very seriously yeah yeah yeah i also wanted to add this because i'm a historian i'm using archives a lot. I had many different experiences with archives, but mostly positive ones. I was, for my PhD, I was working with the collection of women's estates at the University of Vienna and they were very supportive. And I just wanted to add another dimension because when, while working in this project, collecting migration, we were also in contact with not just individuals, but also associations, migrant associations, workers clubs, and some of them had their own archive, or some of them had their own collection. And I also experienced the fact that a lot went missing and it is kind of like that it is kept is often the outcome of the responsibility of one person one person that cares and when this person is gone a lot of things can get missing, can get lost so putting these things into an institutional archive, official archive, could also have the positive effect of keeping up the heritage. I mean it's a collection of a press photographer, but I face and the keeper is the daughter of the photographer and she has her agendas, she has her interests that not necessarily meet mine or in some respects yes, in some others not. And this is difficult because she also keeps bags, she kept bag stuff. And if it would have been in an official archive, I would have an overview of what is there, what is not there. So, I mean, there are many sites to archives and archiveival practices. And I think we have to add one dimension to this too, that once those categories of tagging or categorizations have been established, it takes a long time to change them again, and a great effort to work through these structures once they have been established. Anna? I have just a very short comment based also on my experience with working with institutional archives and that one of the questions, of course, no one can predict the the future but institutions also change with time and in the case of a foundation in Portugal an archive that used to be very very accessible and has gathered like really major documentation about the whole anti-fascist resistance and the revolutionary process, and to which people are also eager to donate materials, is then in the last years, it's going bankrupt. It's like a private foundation, and the only way they have to finance themselves is by making the accessibility to these documents very very very expensive and this was something that no one could predict maybe 20 years ago and I'm sure that many people would not have donated their materials if they knew that this would happen so this is also the thing, an institution also changes throughout time that this would happen. So this is also the thing, you know, like an institution also changes throughout time. So how... But then it can also change in the other way, institutions that are not very accessible become more accessible or are making an effort to... Yeah, but I wonder in this question we're discussing now, what is the guarantee of accessibility of the archive? Institutionalizing, keeping it, it's hard to say. There is no guarantee. I can also add one of my earlier experiences with a digital archive actually. So that's also keeping the visual material digitally and that is also reproducible. That was one of the challenges that because there was this amazing textile archive from it's a historical archive modern turkeys textile patterns and Sumerbank is the factory and it was the archive is acquired by the Izmir University of Economics and they were doing a great job they digitalized many patterns but because of the copyright issues they had to shut down the whole work and it's really a pity also because the company is closed but actually it's privatized and it's really a pity also because the company is closed but actually it's privatized and it's a holding now so it's a the the name still stays but they don't produce fabrics anymore and the whole and people through this digital archive wanted to reproduce these patterns and sell them. So with the fear, also with the complications, and this whole archive is not digital anymore. And which is a pity, because that's how I made my master's project. Actually, that this digital archive helped a lot. And then seeing the archive in person too so I don't know if you have any comments on this keeping it digitally and this copyright and this reproducible effect is it a challenge is it something productive or do you have any comments on it? We're lucky in that sense because Centropas was founded as a digital archive. We didn't do anything except collect photographs and documents. do anything except collect photographs and documents uh and from the get-go from the very first interview it was uh taking the um uh the photograph or the or the uh personal document from the person taking it to a high quality scanner in their town whether it was in novizad or sofia or bucharest or wherever uh and scanning them and istanbul by the way uh and getting a very high quality scan uh and then preserving it that way and then creating a rubric um there were back in 2000 this was these were early days but it was a great time because the laptops the price for laptops had come down dramatically. And creating data capture software, there was a company, I don't know if anybody remembers it, called FileMaker. And it was a database you could use yourself. And you could change it for nothing. And you could buy copies of it very cheaply. So we were able to use, we were founded as a digital archive. And then every person who signed a contract with us that we could use it is that we have non-exclusive rights. You can sell it any way you want, but so can we. And we're asking for the copyright. So we put that in the contract starting in 2000. and we're we're lucky the the most important thing of course was with with uh digitizing um uh images i mean textiles it's a fabulous idea but god i don't know how you would uh you know uh the the to really photograph it well and make it look good and then you come up with your copyright uh problem and then when you want to sell something then you open up a whole can of worms uh when we were working in as i said we worked in 20 countries but really let's say 15 we um we had lots of interviewers who came to us and said someone wants to sell us something you know an object or something like that and i said i don't care what it is we're not buying it because once you open the door for buying something from people and then in every country let's say in russia and estonia etc etc and bulgaria and turkey you don't want to buy anything because that means are you going to trust your coordinator who handles it are you going to trust the interviewer who's uh uh buying it you're going to trust the person who's selling it. You just don't want to go there. Or I didn't want to go there. I'm just, in my current project, I've been digitizing negatives from the archive of this press photographer, who passed away and who was photographing Yugoslav migrants in Vienna but also around all around Austria in the 70s and 80s and I mean there's this contract with the current owner that we set up but I'm and I want to integrate that we set up. But I'm, so it is, and I want to integrate around 100 or around 120 photographic series into a database and make it accessible to the public through the platform Visual Archive Southeastern Europe, founded at the University of Graz located now at the Austrian Academy of Science but there's a risk because he portrayed migrants, persons and a lot of the pictures were published in the 1970s in special magazines for migrants. But I have no... I found one family. I could so far. It's a very time-consuming effort, but I got in contact with a woman who was aged 12 when the photographer came by to her house and photographed her and her siblings. And she was very happy to get this. So she wanted to have copies of these photographs. But this is a lucky case and they mean a lot to her. But I don't know what's going to happen if people will identify themselves online so there is this risk that they say oh I don't want to be seen online so but I'm this is yeah I would I will see and so this is an open question that's why that's why a lot of image archives do not put photographs online from the last 50 years or so so they stop in the 1970s so we'll see yeah I can only say we are not there yet but we decided for the digitalization project to publish only material documents until 1954 to simply avoid any trouble with rights for now because researching the rights is of course very time consuming and complicated so for now but this is also the biggest holding in the archive the era before 54 let's say so yeah it's a good first step yeah there's still a lot of work to do and yeah this has round table has come to an end thank you very much for sharing your stories, your insights your approaches and thank you also to the audience for your questions and i think i will pass over to the organizers now to guide us through the rest of the program for today.