Stefanie Sargnagel

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 second week of the festival, Stefanie Sargnagel, one of the most acerbic critics of homegrown Austrian culture and its male chauvinism, drifts through Graz visiting familiar and less familiar places. During the town’s most exuberant expression of local patriotism (and patriarchy?), the folk festival Aufsteirern, she watches teenagers and pensioners alike get dressed up in their leather pants and dirndls, navigating the crowded streets and their drunken mayhem. In the traditional Beisel pubs and in the parks’ dubious nightlife scenes, Sargnagel looks for the darker corners of the city and their brighter sides.


Bio
Stefanie Sargnagel (1986, Vienna, Austria) is a writer and cartoonist published widely in German-language online and print media. Her essays and biofiction offer critical and irreverent explorations of Austria in the age of neoliberal capitalism. A critic of male sexism, she is a member of the anti-chauvinist fraternity Burschenschaft Hysteria. She lives in Vienna.

15.–19.9.

In the streets of Graz and online

In German

Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ʼ21