The Free Republic of Vienna will be proclaimed on 17 May 2024 under Milo Rau’s new artistic direction. A grand ceremony in front of Vienna’s city hall will see the Council of the Republic, a body of a hundred people, claim the title of sovereign amid statements and contributions by local and international stars, activists and bands that will culminate in everyone joining together to sing the new hymn. This will be the extraordinary start of five festival weeks during which Vienna will become a laboratory for a Second Modernism: global, delimited, utopian, radically political and radically aesthetic.