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The Fools’ Tower ... or is it?
Readings with musical accompaniment, A 1998

Confronting the cliché

Performances:
16-21 Feb 1998 in the Narrenturm (Fools´Tower) (Federal Pathologic-anatomical museum of Vienna)

The Fools´ Tower: a text collage by Emre Tuncer
Perpetuum Mobile of Violence

"Is violence the evil product of depraved individuals or a mass phenomenon? If we subscribe to the former view, criminal acts are only carried out by a scattering of independant perpetrators. To maintain order, stringent legislation must ensure that they are kept behind bars, cut off from the outside world. Cause and effect are placed on an equal footing which inevitably leads to the situation worsening ,thus highlighting the holes in this theory.

One of the most famous proponents of adopting a comprehensive society-based approach was Wilhelm Reich (Harald Jokesch). His theory, that all patriarchal-authoritarian societies are based upon sexual repression, seeking a pleasure substitute in heightened aggression and brutal sadism, made headlines in the 30s and showed Reich to be far too prickly a contemporary, better suited to a life in jail, where he died in 1957.

One generation earlier, Helen von Druskowitz (Eva Dité) had already met a similar fate. A university-qualified philospher, she developed the theory of a Pyramid of Violence: Man on top, lording it over all mechanisms of repression. Women and children serve as catalysts. A perpetuum mobile of barbarism is created, the abused become the abusers.
Druskowitz sought to investigate the roots of madness throughout the world and was herself declared insane.

In "The Fools´Tower....or is it?" (still on show till 21 Feb in the Narrenturm, former AKH-General Hospital) Emre Tuncer links these historic figures with the present. The feminist linguist Luise F.Pusch (Gabriele Rahnama) also makes an appearance as does the super-ego of the mass media (Christian Aichinger).

Throbbing drum rhythmns (Leon Koffi) echo the urgency of this topic and make this collage a testimony of Zeitgeist, throughout generations, as well as a pacifist manifesto."

Christine Dobretsberger, Wiener Zeitung: 19/2/98

 


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