Page - 107 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

107 Hardly Homemad(e) country. Ingeniously Schlingensief positioned asylum seekers as the contestants in a twisted reality-tv show. A container was set up next to the Staatsoper with blue FPÖ flags hoisted above it as well as the logo of the Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s largest news- paper renowned for its populism, and, lest there was any doubt about these references, a large sign declaring “Ausländer raus” [“Foreigners Out”] was mounted on top. Then, just as in the Dutch television show Big Brother, which began airing in 1999 and was immensely popular in Germany and Austria, twelve people identified as asylum seekers were brought in to live in the container and were subject to round-the-clock coverage on an internet-tv channel set up expressly for the spectacle: www. auslaenderraus3.at. The public was invited to not just watch but to call in every day and vote for the two candidates they wanted to see deported from the country. At 8 o’clock every evening the two who had received the most votes that day were (un) ceremoniously removed from the container and shoved into a waiting vehicle. The prize for the last remaining non-deportee was 30,000 Austrian schillings, around 2,180 Euro or less than half the prize money offered in Graz, and marriage to an Aus- trian citizen through which they would attain the status of a legal resident. The show was intended to push all kinds of political but- tons, and of course it did. Not only was the website unable to manage the amount of traffic it got and kept crashing, people turned out in droves to take in the spectacle, and there was a week-long public debate. The event ran from June 11–17, and one of the more interesting moments came on Thursday, June 15, when “about 600 protestors attacked the container and tried to demolish the ‘Ausländer raus!’ sign” (Weiss 2001, 61). It was initially unclear whether the action was supposed to be part of the spectacle or not, and when it in fact turned out not to be, but was rather Viennese protesters looking to show up Schlin- gensief, he and his team derided them, leveling critique “at the failure of ‘well-meaning leftie activists’ to mount an effective