This year, two artists of steirischer herbst ’19 were invited to enter into an artistic dialogue with selected events of the parallel program.

Jule Flierl’s sound and poetry performance is a reinterpretation of a 1972 propaganda poem by Werner Kunz entitled Erz des Friedens (Ore of Peace). The poem romanticizes the extraction of uranium by the East German mining company Wismut during the Cold War. In her performance, Flierl transforms the meaning of the poem’s words by isolating their sonic qualities, thus proposing an exercise in listening to a ravaged and damaged landscape. As an intervention within the exhibition Connected. Peter Kogler with . . ., Flierl’s performance serves as an explicitly physical contrast to Ballet Mécanique (1924), the first Surrealist-Dadaist piece to link film montage and mechanical music.