Reordering

Foreword
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Summer Semester 2010 is the tenth semester for Kunstraum Lakeside. We would like to focus in this tenth program on questioning the habits, expectations and (tacit) dictates that can be bound up in both the concrete space of cultural production and in certain political discourses.
Which patterns of order in our thoughts, ways of speaking and ways of acting push through what has already been said and done to—gently or obstinately— affect our current pronouncements? How can we reorder things by, for example, assessing pet words like «critical» for their limiting side effects?
One of the most extreme examples in Austria of a political and media discourse that has taken on a life of its own is the theme of asylum. Whenever events such as an earthquake or the Olympics are not available to provide a temporary distraction, the A-word tends to dominate newspaper front pages and telemedia politics. Contrasting starkly with the pivotal importance with which this «problem» is endowed in an ongoing pattern of stimulus and response is the actual steady decline in the number of asylum seekers in recent years, and the even smaller number of those whose application is accepted. …>>