Page - 44 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

44 siting futurity students, apprentices, and guest workers’ and a meeting center”] (Mayer 2012, 45). The spread of what was referred to then as the squatting movement was made clear by the West Berlin month- ly, Der lange Marsch, which reported in May 1973 of squats in “American slums, London Islington, and Milan’s Via Tibaldi” (Sedlmaier 2014, 213). The oldest of the fifty-one selected historical and active sites of occupation in Vienna mapped in the catalogue of the 2012 Besetzt! Kampf um Freiräume seit den 70ern [Occupied! Struggle for Free Spaces since the ’70s] exhibition at the Wien Museum (Nußbaumer and Schwarz 2012, 78–79) is the Amerlinghaus, a beautiful building two blocks behind the Museumsquartier in the seventh district, which dates back to 1700 and in which painter Friedrich von Amerling was born in 1803. By the early 1970s, the building, although protected as a historical site [den- kmalgeschützt], stood empty in a stretch of buildings that were falling apart. A day-long festival held in the Spittelberg neigh- borhood in the summer of 1973 became a week-long Spittelberg- woche in 1974, while the following year, in the face of demoli- tion, an occupation proved an important first step in converting it into the cultural center it is today.7 The following summer of 1976 brought more threats to places important to those beyond the mainstream and inadequately provided for by bourgeois institutions. While neglecting the 7 In 1980 a second occupation proved necessary, and in 2012 the story was far from over (cf. Reinprecht 2012). At the time of writing, it continues to function as a space of resistance, with the understanding that “En- gagement braucht Raum und eine solidarische Infrastruktur, die diesem wohlwollend und unterstützend entgegen kommt, niedrigschwellig zugänglich und administrativ gut koordiniert ist. Räume gesellschaftlicher Teilhabe und Involvierung sind unverzichtbar, und gerade angesichts einer zunehmenden bedrohlichen Faschisierung und Entdemokratisierung sind Orte, an denen kritische Basis/kultur/arbeit stattfinden kann, nötiger denn je.” [“Engagement requires space and an infrastructure of solidarity that fosters and supports it, is easily accessible and well organized. Spaces of social participation and involvement are essential, and especially in the face of increasingly threatening fascist and anti-democratic tendencies, places in which foundational critical cultural work can take place are more necessary than ever”] (http://www.amerlinghaus.at).