Future art in spaces of possibility – Liechtenstein
SCHAAN – In the new volume “Drafts” in the Literaturhaus series “Telling Liechtenstein”, fellow citizens and officials report on their future visions for the country.
The writing of history, too, is not just a record of quasi-scientifically proven facts, but also a form of narration in a document that would otherwise only be attributed to literature. If you look at old chronicles, in medieval or garantee sources, everyone would immediately agree that they are mainly historiographies colored by perspective. A Roman poet and historian reports rumors of Germanic tribes beyond the Limes, praises the wisdom of his current emperor and berates the incompetence of his predecessor. Everything deceived? No, only probable narratives and often the only surviving written sources for ancient events that are available to historians today. Medieval chronicles show a very similar picture, which was not corrected by any critical media public of the time.
History is told perspective
Has everything gotten better in the 20th or even 21st century? no Because even in the media awakening a little more than a hundred years ago (photography, daily newspapers, film, radio, cinema newsreels), countless ideologies between democracy, dictatorship, (absolutist) monarchy, communism, fascism were still fighting through wars and across Europe. And what these “modern times” brought was ultimately just an explosion of ideologically colored histories and narratives, depending on the country and decade in which contemporary events were being portrayed.
The now dawning suspicion is correct: historiography was never a scientific, objective description of facts, it is not today and will not be in the future. Writing history was, is and will be: telling stories from different motivated perspectives. That is why the Literaturhaus Liechtenstein was able to start the project “Telling Liechtenstein” five years ago with a clear conscience, in order to shed a different light on the country’s past and future, because this “alternative facts” (Copyright Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway in January 2017) actually means «alternative narrative perspectives».
Knowing that all historiography depends on perspective and is narrative, the editors of the first two volumes of “Liechtenstein narrating” “Democratic Moments” (2017) and “Awakenings” (2019) – Roman Banzer and Hansjörg Quaderer from the Literaturhaus in Schaan and Roy Sommer from the University of Wuppertal – first, various eyewitnesses to the events surrounding the women’s suffrage struggles of March 1971 and the debates about the EEA vote of October 1992 have their say, and in the second volume, the actors of the time give the broadest possible (alternative) cultural and social history of the country from 1964 tell until 1984.
In the third volume just published, “Drafts”, which was presented as part of a very well-attended reading with the actress Christiani Wetter on Wednesday in the Gasometer Triesen, various compatriots from young to old as well as institutional representatives from the state administration discuss their visions for the future of Liechtenstein questioned . The result is various future narratives that are just as perspective as the various observations of the past.
Living democracy is an open discourse of perspectives – regardless of whether it concerns the past or the (possible) future. This also makes the third volume “Drafts” in the five-volume “Liechtenstein Stories” series from the Liechtenstein Literature House as varied and exciting as the previous volumes “Democratic Moments” (2017) and “Awakenings” (2019). All available in Literature House Liechtenstein.