Page - 117 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

117 Hardly Homemad(e) py way from lathes, boards, bed sheets, steel, mirrors, and sand, stuffed to bursting with monitors and stage props, the structure has visitors stumbling from one room to the next, pressing against beds, baby carriages, shelves full of rabbits, and a giant mask (said to be Beuys’s death mask). In its open mouth runs a video of the decaying rabbit already used to great effect in Parsifal. This is “the birth chamber, where the myth and legend begin,” according to Schlingensief. On the rotating stage is an installation called “The Animato- graph,” including such things as an “Ur-Clo” [“Ancient Toi- let”], “Kreuzweg” [“Stations of the Cross”], “Myonenregen” [“Muon Rain”], and, in the midst of everything, a boar from Namibia, where Schlingensief was stationed recently with his team and where he made a film, part of which now graces the Vienna installation. (Vogel 2006) The presence of a Namibian boar is evidence of Schlingensief’s desire, as he approached the end of his life, to embed parts of the colonizers’ and the colonizeds’ cultures physically into each other. In addition to initiating a project to build an opera house in Burkina Faso and collaborating with performers from Bur- kina Faso on his last production Via Intolleranza II, he also put on an exhibition of film and photos from his trip to Kathmandu and Bhaktapur in Nepal at the Kunstraum Innsbruck from Feb- ruary 16 to March 29, 2008 entitled Der König wohnt in mir [The King Lives in Me]. Given his earlier projects, this staging of en- counters with art from “foreign” places would seem intended to provoke confrontation and critical thought about the cultural processes involved in (de)colonization. Yet his final performance in Vienna was entitled Mea Cul- pa. Of course, given that it is Schlingensief, the phrase requires some interrogation. While he in his usual inimitable style half- jokingly blamed himself and his decision to stage Wagner’s poisonous Parsifal at Bayreuth in 2004 for his terminal illness, calling it “Todesmusik” [“death music”], he also used the oc- casion to draw attention to the shaming that the ill, and espe- cially the terminally ill, too often undergo. In his own words,