OUTSIDERS
the normal staging of L201 by Franz von Strolchen

The term OUTSIDER describes the deviation from a “norm”. However, this “deviation” is nothing more than a social construction that serves above all to make the public fear and criminalize certain groups. The concept of the OUTSIDER is therefore not about the quality of a bad person, but about someone defining the behavior of another person as bad.

Franz von Strolchen stages the view of a section of the street as an associative reflection on OUTSIDER. Who or what are OUTSIDERS? Who defines an OUTSIDER? And what can we find out about the “normal” on the basis of OUTSIDERS?

In an open-air theater, 50 spectators look onto a stage that shows a street with what appears to be real traffic and street noise. A text that analyzes and classifies what is happening is played on an LED caption board in the audience's field of vision - at the same time, the caption text deals with the concept of the OUTSIDER.

What happens here seems normal at first, like normal evening traffic on the L201 highway. But the absurdly philosophical text soon makes what we see seem more and more staged - as if all the cars rushing by, people walking past and even the animals were OUTSIDERS, not “normal”. In reality, it is a mixture of staged and non-staged moments on this section of road. When, at some point, strange objects fly by in the sky above the viewers and a real tank drives through the picture, the viewers can no longer be sure what is actually normal here. As a result, they have to question their own OUTSIDERhood - or their NORMALITY, as the case may be.

Events:

Friday 1. August, 3:30 PM
Opening / Performance

Friday, 8. August, 8 PM
Performance

Christian Winkler (1981 Graz), alias Franz von Strolchen, is an author and director. In his work, he repeatedly deals with the boundaries between reality and fiction and the depiction of social dynamics in which the seemingly ordinary often turns into the astonishing.

L201

The art space L201 is located in Studenzen, in the southeast Styrian municipality of Kirchberg an der Raab. It defines the driveway of a single-family house and forms the border to the heavily frequented Landesstrasse 201. Due to its open structure, the surroundings remain visible and audible and become part of the works on display. In 2021, this display was conceived by Alfred Lenz as part of an intervention by Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark (Art in Public Space Styria) and has since been used by artists in a contextual way.