"Securing our future": Where is our gun cabinet?
Many people who follow the work and ideas at FORUM STADTPARK will have noticed the gun cabinet that hung prominently in the building for many years. Its installation caused quite a few debates within Graz' cultural scene - now it's gone. You can find out how this came about here.
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In 2010, FORUM STADTPARK launched a project titled "Securing the future ", initiated by Max Höfler, the representative for literature. Against the backdrop of the preceding economic crisis in 2008, the question of how to prepare for financially unstable times was addressed - also as an art association in the city of Graz.
The idea of "Securing the Future"
The project money was ultimately used to purchase firearms for FORUM STADTPARK, but they were explicitly not to be weapons of war or historical weapons. The condition was that they were in working order and were predicted to increase in value in the future. In this way, they were intended to help Forum Stadtpark in financial need.
The rest is history - after careful planning, the gun cabinet was soon installed in the foyer of the forum - at a height inaccessible to visitors and with closely guarded keys. Just over ten years and many discussions later, it was taken down again
From firearm to pasta machine
The reason for this is a new art project that deals with securing the future in a completely different way. The exhibition NO HOPE NO FEAR with a "left-wing prepper cellar" deals, among other things, with the question of how we want to live, how we can prepare for further crises, what we can make useful for ourselves and how.
It is doubtful whether the original purpose of weapons as killing machines is a useful one. This is why the artists' collective Breaded Escalope was commissioned to repurpose the weapons - to make them unusable as weapons and useful in other ways.
The collective achieved exactly that: first they shot pasta sieves out of metal bowls, then the weapons were dismantled and converted into a pasta machine (Antipasti) and a heater (Happyness is a warm gun). The results of the project were on display in the basement of FORUM STADTPARK from 18 November 2023 to 20 January 2024.
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