The work group “Plattform Geschichtspolitik” (Platform for History Politics*) is an initiative of students, activists and teachers associated with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, which defines itself as an open collective, according to the logic of the work groups that have been formed within the Academy occupation of 2009/2010. It marks the beginning of a continuous process of critically reflecting and publicly dealing with the Academy’s participation in Colonialism, (Austro-)Fascism and Nazism as well as the question of how it has been dealt with in terms of the participation of institutions and individuals in those processes until today. As is all too usual for Austrian institutions, these histories of the Academy have been repressed thus far. One of the few projects that publicly dealt with the fascist and nazist history of the Academy is a symposium and a subsequent publication that were initiated and organized by a group of students in 1990 who were then faced with the opposition of the institution. Since October 2009, the work group has tried to link its activities to that work, aiming to evoke a broader discussion of history politics at the Academy as well as beyond the institution.
http://www.plattform-geschichtspolitik.org/
http://interventionplease.plattform-geschichtspolitik.org/
Eduard Freudmann, born 1979 in Vienna, is an artist and filmmaker, who researches and intervenes in the intersections of art and politics, power relations and social contexts, history-politics and media mechanisms, strategies of exclusion and the commodification of knowledge. He studied art in Vienna and Weimar and currently works on his PhD at the Department for Visual Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, dealing with post-genocidal identity constructions of third generation Shoah survivors between anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism. Since 2007, he has been teaching at the Department for Post-Conceptual Art Practices at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he participated in the education protests as a Squatting Teacher.
