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siting futurity
piness. It is also being sustained thanks to the image-making of
tourists and the meaning of weddings among the growing Chi-
nese middle class. What Ackbar Abbas wrote about Asian cit-
ies in “Faking Globalization” — that they are where “the urban
experiments of the 21st century will take place” because Asian
cities “make it clear that the city exists as not just a physical,
political and economic entity that can be documented, but also
a cluster of images, a series of discourses, an experience of space
and place, and a set of practices that need to be interpreted” (Ab-
bas 2008, 244; italics added) — is true not only of Hallstatt See
but of both Hallstatts. That is what the Austrian “BfH — Bürger
für Hallstatt” [Citizens for Hallstatt] mobilized against in their
2015 local election. Of the opinion that bus tourism was hurt-
ing both the quality of life of many Hallstätter as well as the
holiday experience of those guests staying on for longer than a
few hours, they formed an association to push for action, such
as raising the parking fees for buses.14 What the Hallstätter were
noticing is that mass tourism was hollowing out their village,
robbing it of its heart and turning into a soulless place subject to
the “tourist gaze” (Urry and Larsen 2011). In other words, their
village was becoming increasingly not just like its Chinese clone
but also like “the standard narrative of the clone” as Mitchell
outlines it: a “headless, mindless, soulless creature, the exem-
plification of the human organism reduced to ‘bare life’ […],
the reduction of the human organism to a purely instrumental
and commodified condition” (Mitchell 2011, 37). Cities, we are
reminded, are living organisms that can sleep and be in need
of resuscitation. The Chinese cloning of them encourages us to
see them as living images and to probe their, which is to say our,
futurity in the final section, by revisiting the Jurassic universe.
14 Statistics bear them out. The mayor reported at the beginning of 2019:
“2014 hatten wir 7917 Reisebusse, 2018 waren es 19.344” [“In 2014 we had
7914 coaches; in 2018 it was 19,344”] (“Hallstatt will Touristenmassen
besser lenken” 2019).
Siting Futurity
The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Titel
- Siting Futurity
- Untertitel
- The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Autor
- Susan Ingram
- Verlag
- punctumbooks
- Ort
- New York
- Datum
- 2021
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-953035-48-6
- Abmessungen
- 12.6 x 20.2 cm
- Seiten
- 224
- Schlagwörter
- activism, Austria, contemporary art, contemporary theater, protest culture, radicalism, social protest, Vienna
- Kategorie
- Geographie, Land und Leute
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Preface 11
- Introduction 19
- 1. (Re)Forming Vienna’s Culture of Resistance: The Proletenpassions @ #Arena 39
- 2. Converting Kebab and Currency into Community on Planet #Ottakring 57
- 3. Lazarus’s Necropolitical Afterlife at Vienna’s #Volkstheater 81
- 4. Hardly Homemad(e): #Schlingensief’s Container 101
- 5. From Grand Hotels to Tiny Treasures: Wes Anderson and the Ruin Porn Worlds of Yesterday 119
- 6. Capitalism, Schizophrenia, and #Vanlife: The Alpine Edukation of Hans Weingarter 143
- 7. #Hallstatt: Welcome to Jurassic World 161
- Bibliography 189
- Filmography 215