The Box of Truth is a glass container in the courtyard of Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier. It contains two chairs and a lie detector. Every Vienna Trial weekend will start with two public figures being attached to the lie detector and subjected to a public hearing by actor Bibiana Beglau. The thirty-minute sessions will examine particular moral and political constellations that lie behind the scandals of the Vienna Trials. Setting out from life stories, experiences and decisions taken by the prominent participants, the Box of Truth will become a place of political contradictions and ethical dilemmas.
Climate activists, pro-Palestine activists and not least the Wiener Festwochen itself: the last of the three Vienna Trials confronts us with the Hypocrisy of Do-Gooders in three very different cases. To start with, the Box of Truth will raise questions: How radical may or should artistic and activist means be in our times in order to do justice to the state of emergency that has been proclaimed on many fronts? Which forms of activism are legitimate even if they are illegal? Does the end really justify the means?
Afra Porsche, born in 1998, plays a leading role in The Last Generation Austria. Like many of her generation, she has grown up with concern about the climate and our future on the earth. She is a student of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She has been taking to the streets together with many others to raise a loud voice of protest for a sustainable world worth living in. During an Erasmus stay in Norway in 2021, she came across a Last Generation partner organisation and has since been using peaceful means of civil disobedience to fight the existence-threatening climate policy of European states. She has been a member of Last Generation Austria since the summer of 2023. Last Generation Austria are campaigning for climate protection to be enshrined in the constitution among other things by means of street blockades and event disruptions. While some dismiss them as ‘climate terrorists’ and delegitimise them, others consider their cause justified and support the movement. Porsche and other members of the Last Generation are subjects of investigation, having been charged with forming a criminal organisation. Nevertheless, she puts almost all her time into her work in and for the movement and continues to fight for climate justice together with other followers.
Milo Rau, born in Berne in 1977, is a director, author and lecturer and used to be the artistic director of NTGent (Belgium). He has been the artistic director of the Wiener Festwochen since 1 July 2023. Rau studied Sociology, German Philology and Romance Philology in Paris, Berlin and Zurich, among others with Pierre Bourdieu and Tzvetan Todorov. While some critics celebrate him as the ‘most influential’, ‘most interesting’ or ‘most ambitious artist of our time’, others consider him a mere ‘left-wing joker’, ‘smoke bomber’ and ‘cheap provocateur’ who resorts to social and political grievances for his own self-promotion in his productions. Since 2002, Rau has released over fifty plays, films, books and actions. His theatre productions have been shown at major international festivals and have toured over thirty countries worldwide. Rau started his artistic directorship of the Wiener Festwochen with his five-year-concept of the Free Republic of Vienna, a republic of the arts with its own institutions such as a council comprising international stars as well as citizens of the city of Vienna. Once again, opinions are divided: While the newspaper Die Welt recently wrote about the festival that it is showing ‘the most exciting theatre currently on offer’, the Viennese magazine Falter saw nothing but a ‘storm in a champagne flute’. The newspaper Der Standard judged it ‘a masquerade of democratic political thought’.
Interrogation, Moderation Bibiana Beglau Dramaturgy Claus Philipp
Outside the Box of Truth performance, the glass container in front of the MQ will be transformed into the Cemetery of the Republic by the Academy of Fine Arts.
