In the politically highly controversial election year 2010, the art project “SoHo in Ottakring” critically examined a wide-spread “bad habit”: thinking along racist lines. In Vienna, a persistent crisis mood and increasing unemployment had obviously enhanced the fear of everything felt to be “foreign.” Many immigrants are not free from racism either. This was why it seemed about time to start a public hygiene campaign: Kick the Habit – Pfeif drauf! Ventil Rassismus (Racism as a Vent).
SoHo 2010 turned into an experimental arrangement for answering the question whether art can have political effects and thus contribute to the unfinished project of the Enlightenment. The latter’s present-day form always and foremost means self-enlightenment.

Stephen Mathewson with special guests Maura Jasper and Josh Thompson: Informal Research Lab
Grundsteingasse 15, backyard building, 1160 Vienna
In an open laboratory, an international group of artists, in tandem with the Vienna-based artist and musician Stephen Mathewson, worked through huge piles of materials on racism – collected on site as well as brought in – viewing, sorting, digesting, editing, discussing it, in manners involving all the senses. During the festival period, these artists created a public and traceable reaction that might find its final form in an object, a movement, a performance, a book, or even a single sentence.

Hansel Sato: Österreichische Nachrichten (Austrian News)
Subway stations and Brunnenviertel, 1160 Vienna
As a supposed mass media product, Hansel Sato’s paper displayed the general characteristics of a newly introduced free newspaper in its design, whereas its contents subtly questioned all kinds of discriminating representations of migrants and their political exclusion in Austria.
In the context of the project, the format of the free newspaper, as it presents itself as a popular information medium passing through numerous hands in Vienna every day, served as both an invitation and an offer to reflect familiar stereotypes in the discourse of the masses, to adopt new perspectives, and to rediscover positive aspects of a multicultural society and an empathic attitude.

OBJECTION. Antiracist workshop blumberg
Blumberggasse 20/Neulerchenfelder Straße 90, 1160 Vienna
The populist right has increasingly radicalized its language in recent years. Racist symbols mark the city’s public space, and statements on legal election posters often surpass explicit right-wing graffiti in their allegedly unreflected toughness and force. The antiracist posters and gimmicks produced in the silkscreen printing and graphic workshop helped to raise objections without losing oneself in lengthy, often fruitless discussions.
Eight workshops dedicated to different subjects were organized in collaboration with artists and NGOs such as ZARA and SOS Mitmensch. Interested visitors, groups (from schools, for example), and individual persons were asked to participate in the project.
Workshops: Wednesday–Saturday, 5:00–10:00 p.m.
Organization: Karoline Brand
Concept: Katharina Struber
Workshops: Edith Schild

wiener kunst schule (printing workshop): Wenn die Cevapcici und der Leberkäs’ mit dem Kebab …
Café Müller, Payergasse 14, and various cheese and snack stalls on Brunnenmarkt, 1160 Vienna
Opening: May 15, 2010, exhibition: May 16–22, 2010
Leberkäs, Kebab, and Cevapcici have peacefully coexisted in Vienna’s fast food scene for about twenty-five years. This was the starting point for a multilingual cartoon series that followed the adventures of the three protagonists, cevapcici, leberkäs, and kebab, in the city of 2010. The stories dealt with the subjects of everyday racism and prejudice in a critical to provocative manner.
Produced as silkscreen prints on foil-coated wrapping paper for sausages, the comics were offered to the people running sausage and kebab stalls in the Brunnenmarkt and Yppenmarkt area as wrapping paper for their products.

Issue 9 of the art and street magazine kunst in migration / art in migration: Paper(s) as Material and Politics
Paper is a medium of social memory, establishes continuity/ continuities, and preserves a society’s unconscious.
Yet, paper is also a very fragile material – easy to destroy and burn. Paper yellows, disappears, accumulates. In view of the fact that a piece of paper, namely the ballot paper, would play a crucial role in Vienna in the fall elections in 2010, the project aimed at conveying how fragile the sense of social cohesion is or becomes when it is only based on paper: on certificates of citizenship, naturalization papers, certificates of registration, marriage documents. Are such papers enough to ensure social cohesion and, above all, integration?