Page - 40 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

40 siting futurity wochen, and ended up lending its name to what is arguably the most influential occupation in Viennese history, that is, of an abandoned slaughterhouse in the light industrial St. Marx area for 100 days in the late summer of 1976. The Arena’s demands to turn the Auslands-abattoir [foreign slaughterhouse] into an au- tonomously governed cultural center were not realized as they wanted, and the site went on to become a textile center. Howev- er, they were able to secure the smaller Inlands-abattoir [domes- tic slaughterhouse] nearby, which has since taken on symbolic as well as practical importance as a site for resistant cultural practices. The Arena occupation is credited with sparking the city’s slumbering tradition of activist willingness to take a stand, whether on stages, in the streets or in buildings abandoned to the nascent forces of speculation, in support of demands for a more equitable social distribution of the city’s and the country’s resources. As the former director of the Wien Museum, Wolf- gang Kos, put it, “the Arena was a gate-crasher, a real impetus for youth movements and media and political movements, too. It changed the city fundamentally; it broadened it” (Kos, cited in V. Buckley 2012). In showing how the Arena went from naming part of a cul- tural festival to naming both a movement and a physical loca- tion, this chapter demonstrates the mechanism by which spaces can become historically saturated places that make future prac- tices possible, in this case of both theatrical and political resist- ance. It details, first, the formation of the Arena, how and why it came into being, and the tradition of occupation it helped to spawn to confront the increasing profitability of real-estate speculation. Then, in turning to the most influential of the piec- es that debuted there in the summer of 1976, the Proletenpas- sion by the Schmetterlinge [Butterflies], it shows how Vienna’s radical theatrical practitioners continue to find space outside the city’s central institutions to keep alive a tradition of political engagement that involves both cultural productions and social practices.