Heimo Halbrainer and Joachim Hainzl (CLIO)

Situation Report (2021)
Video series

Each week of the festival program is accompanied by uniquely performative video reports from the streets and environs of Graz. They are not “coverage” in the traditional sense, but rather artistic and intellectual projects, complementing the festival’s other situations.

During the final week of the festival, Heimo Halbrainer and Joachim Hainzl of CLIO explore the darker side of picturesque Graz’s history, honing in on the lasting impact of the Nazi era and its aftermath. During the Anschluss of Austria to Germany in 1938, Graz was famous as the “city of national uprising” and became Hitler’s first stop on his tour of the country. Halbrainer and Hainzl visit the eerie sites of Graz’s (not so) hidden Nazi history—the university, where the Nazi’s pseudoscientific racial doctrines were taught, the Gestapo headquarters and the execution and euthanasia sites where its victims were persecuted and murdered, and the social housing built during the time.


Bio
Heimo Halbrainer (1963, Knittelfeld, Austria) is a historian whose chief areas of interest are the impact and aftermath of National Socialism in Graz and Styria. Since 1996, he has been head of CLIO, a Graz-based organization dedicated to historical research and education. Its project meld more conventional historical approaches with urban geography and contemporary art. He lives in Graz.

Joachim Hainzl (1968, St. Andrä im Sausal, Austria) is a historian and social education worker with a focus on the social history of Graz. He has published research on the local histories of the city in the context of CLIO and graz2003, with a focus on discourses and practices surrounding public space and its use, as well as mechanisms of marginalization and exclusion. He has also produced work as an artist and is a passionate collector. He lives in Graz.

4.–10.10.

In the streets of Graz and online

In German

Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ʼ21