the research program
The overarching Research Program of AIR InSILo is focused on the work within the local context as well with the notion of "locality" in a wider sense. It offers a model and seeks new methodologies of critical work with the concept of non-place, which, particularly here, in Hollabrunn, manifests itself as an average European agricultural settlement without special historical, cultural and political features. The uniqueness of such places is their invisibility. Economic, political and cultural life doesn't reveal itself explicitly; it can become challenging to open up hidden conflicts and struggles concealed under the familiar surface of everyday life. The goal of the program is to create a research platform (in the form of a physical residency as well as a digital magazine) that can function as a template for methodologies of artistic research to be further applied to other realms, conditions, and territories. The research process focuses on the principles of localism and aims to create a critical map bearing in mind topography, ecology, economic division, layers of history, groups of interest, population, anthropology, cultural influences, etc. This approach appears to be important since the urban Umwelt is not representative of the exhaustive understanding of social dynamics. The city areas contain headquarters, but representative outlets of actual processes are embedded in featureless non-places called periphery where the underprivileged and deprived of cultural and political subjectivity are trapped in affirmative, conservative and populist cogitation. To decolonize the own thinking, artistic endeavours aim to recontextualize the obsolete hierarchical concept and make a proposition a decentralized local hub, existing in a horizontal plane towards similar entities of the network.
The subtopics of the Program are formulated with every subsequent open call but aim to enrich the core research direction. The inauguration call (2021/2022) was focused on the notions of decentralization with inclinations to localism and post-development theory, bioregionalism, and the principle of sustainability. The second call (2022/ 2023) focused on a clash of two approaches, degrowth and acceleration, and the third call (2023/2024) revolved around the precarity and current state of artistic labour.