the research program

The Research Program of AIR InSILo is focused on the work with the local context. It offers a model and seeks for 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 form of a physical residency as well as a digital magazine) that can function as a template of 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 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 alike entities of the network.