Welcome
Franz Stephan Pieler, Director of the MAMUZ Museum of prehistory, ancient history and mediaeval archaeology in Asparn an der Zaya and Head of the Department of Archaeology at the State Government of Lower Austria
Franz Pieler, born July 26, 1975 in Vienna, began his studies in Prehistory and History in 1994. Doctorate on the Linear Pottery culture in the Horn Basin. From 2000 Excavation Manager for association ASINOE, from 2009 Research Assistant at Krahuletz-Museum Eggenburg. Since 1 January 2018 employed by the Dept. of Art and Culture of the Lower Austrian Provincial Government, responsible for the area of Prehistory and Medieval Archaeology of Landessammlungen NÖ and Scientific Director of MAMUZ. In addition to the focus on the early Neolithic period, Pieler has worked on numerous projects on historical archaeology and on contemporary history topics.
Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein,
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Project Leader of The Dissident Goddesses‘ Network
Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein is Professor of Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna’s Department of Art Theory and Cultural Studies. Research on art studies, feminist performative theory and artistic practice, production of body and space. Board member of mumok Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Vienna. Deputy Director of the Department of Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Section I
Elisabeth von Samsonow, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Assignment From Below. Making Important Finds in Lower Austria Present. Weaving A Transdisciplinary Research Proposal
My paper systematically addresses the different aspects we bring together in this project. First, I will put a focus on building strong interfaces between archaeology and the humanities (philosophy, sociology and economy) in order to ease the translation of knowledge between the fields and highlight the awareness for a common hermeneutics. Questions arising from this horizon are: How do archaeological finds and their interpretation challenge human self-understanding in concepts of history and (para)chronology? Or: How can, in our case, the story of the female figurines found in Lower Austria be engaged as a momentum in the revision of women’s roles in the region and beyond? Second, I will stress the consistency between the being-an-artwork of the female figurines in question and an aesthetic and artistic approach to them that will help to understand their legacy and their syntax. Finally, I will discuss the core idea of a common stratum of agriculture, geology/geosophy and archaeology, namely the face of the Earth and its function as a biophysical archive.
Elisabeth von Samsonow is an artist, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Visiting Professor at Bauhaus University Weimar (2012), and member of GEDOK Munich. International exhibitions and curatorial work, teaching and research focus on philosophy and history in relation to a theory of collective memory, on the relationship between art, psychology, and politics throughout history until today, on the theory and history of the image of women or female identification (girl studies), sacred androgyny, and the modern “disintegration of the self.” Her artistic work comprises sculpture, performance, painting, and video. She explores the systematic and symbolic place of female sculpture in the artistic canon and the ecological aesthetic or geo-logic of bodies.
Heide Göttner-Abendroth, HAGIA International Academy
Modern matriarchy studies – cultural history – politics.
What do they have to do with each other?
I begin by giving a basic definition of how “matriarchy” is understood in modern matriarchy studies, obtained by studying living societies of this kind (empirical basis). Describing the economic, social, political and spiritual structures that show matriarchies to be gender-egalitarian, balanced, consensual societies, the lecture outlines where they still exist today, going on to explain what modern matriarchy studies imply for a review of cultural history and citing examples that refer particularly to the subject of “goddesses”.
I conclude by outlining the potential political implications of modern matriarchy studies.
Heide Göttner-Abendroth is a philosopher and researcher on culture and society specializing in matriarchal studies. She was born in Thuringia (Germany) in 1941 and is mother to three children, two daughters and one son. In 1973 she gained a Ph.D. in philosophy and theory of science at the University of Munich, and subsequently taught philosophy there for ten years (1973-1983). Since 1976 she has been doing pioneering work in the area of women’s studies in West Germany, as part of which she has published various books on matriarchal society and culture and has become the founding mother of Modern Matriarchal Studies. She works as an independent scholar. In 1986 she founded the “HAGIA. International Academy for Matriarchal Studies and Matriarchal Spirituality” in Germany and has been its director since the outset. She was a visiting professor at the University of Montreal/Canada in 1980 and at the University of Innsbruck/Austria in 1992. Since 1998 she has been a member of the “Institute of Archaeomythology” in California, USA. In 2003, she organized and supervised the First World Congress on Matriarchal Studies SOCIETIES IN BALANCE in Luxembourg, followed by the later Second World Congress on Matriarchal Studies: SOCIETIES OF PEACE in San Marcos, Texas/USA in 2005.
Federica Matta, artist based in Paris, Institut du Tout-Monde
Le Théatre des Imaginaires. A Film
The video by Federica Matta shows an animation of her pocket theatre “Théatre des Imaginaires”, in which the goddesses appear as drawn silhouettes. This animation of the goddesses is to be seen as an artistic interpretation and poetic expression.
Federica Matta is a Franco-Chilean-American artist who has been actively creating her own worlds for the past four decades. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions, as well as public art sculpture, around the world. She is especially fond of public art sculpture, which she finds most rewarding due to its role as a “poetic acupuncture” of sorts that promotes consciousness and harmony in urban environments. In recent years, she has authored seven books that feature her drawings and her texts. Federica is also a regular contributor of political images to Le Monde Diplomatique (Chilean edition). She is a founder and member of the Institut du Tout-Monde.
Section II
Katharina Rebay-Salisbury,
Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, University of Vienna
Is Motherhood Divine? Looking at The Social Status of Motherhood in European Prehistory
Pregnancy, childbirth and early childcare are often implicitly and explicitly associated with motherhood. But we know little about how the transition to motherhood was assessed in prehistory. Maternity is both a social and a biological phenomenon; pregnancy, childbirth and lactation are physical processes that can leave traces in the human skeleton. Within the framework of the ERC Strating Grant project “The value of mothers to society: responses to motherhood and child rearing practices in prehistoric Europe”, correlations between the social and reproductive status of prehistoric women will be investigated. The latest scientific analysis methods provide insights into the life worlds of prehistoric women and their children, which we compare with those of contemporary men.
Katharina Rebay-Salisbury Prehistoric archaeologist with a research focus on the European Bronze and Iron Ages, leader of the research group ‘Prehistoric Identities’. After gaining her PhD at the University of Vienna in 2005, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury was a post-doc at the Universities of Cambridge and Leicester in the UK, where she participated in research programmes on the human body and networks, researching the introduction of cremation in Late Bronze Age Europe and Iron Age networks of human representations. Her monograph ‘The Human Body in Early Iron Age Central Europe’ was published with Routledge in 2016. She returned to Vienna in 2015, with an FWF-funded project on the social status of motherhood in Bronze Age Europe. In the same year, she was awarded the ERC Starting Grant for the project ‘The value of mothers to society’. In this project, she investigates social reactions to pregnancy, childbirth and early parenthood as well as the relationship between women’s reproductive and social status with an interdisciplinary team.
2016 she was elected member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2017, she gained the teaching rights at the University of Vienna for the subject Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology with the habilitation thesis ‘Bodies, identities and social relations in Bronze and Iron Age Central Europe’.
Valeska Becker, University of Münster
Fertility And Death. On The Interpretation of Female Figurines of The Neolithic Age
The transition from the way of life as hunter-gatherers to the way of life as farmers and stockherders took place in a period of several thousand years in the Near East in an area that became known as Fertile Crescent. In this area the wild ancestors of today’s domestic animals and cereals were present. The beginning of the process marks increasing sedentarism, probably in connection with the first attempts to domesticate wild cereals in the 10th/9th millennium BC. The domestication of sheep and goats followed quickly and a little later that of pigs and cattle. With the development of pottery and the production of anthropomorphic, predominantly female figurines, the “Neolithic” package is largely tied up.
The new way of life subsequently spread to South-Eastern and Central Europe. The farmers and stockherders of Central Europe whose legacies can now be found from the Paris Basin in the West to the Ukraine in the East are referred to as a culture with Linear Pottery according to the decoration of their clay vessels. They also made small figurines of humans and animals. Thus a tradition that has ancient origins lives on: This practice was applied in all cultural phenomena of the early Neolithic, from the Near East to Greece and Southeast Europe. From the Central European Linear Pottery we know human and animal figures, as well as human and animal vessels, applications, handles and incised human figurines.
Neolithic figurines have nothing in common with the depictions of humans and animals of the Palaeolithic. Particularly in the Late Palaeolithic, on the one hand luxuriant female “Venus” figures appeared, but on the other hand highly stylized figurines as well as highly individually and realistically drawn human representations appeared as engravings. Animals depicted in cave paintings, engravings, sculptures and reliefs are often characterized by a high degree of realism.
In the Neolithic period, on the other hand, the human figures were characterized by a much higher stylization. Exuberant femininity apparently no longer played a role. Only a third of the figurines are characterized by sexual characteristics. Also the animal representations of the Neolithic are much more strongly stylized – sometimes it is not even possible to determine the animal species exactly.
It is still unclear who or what the figurines represented. Proposals for interpretation include considerations of fertility, death, renewal and ancestor worship.
Valeska Becker, University of Münster, completed her habilitation and was granted the teaching license for the subject of Prehistory and Early History. Since March 2017 she is an Academic Councillor at the University of Münster. Her research focuses on “Beliefs in the Neolithic: Remains of religious action and their interpretation”; “Old Europe in Neolithic and Copper Age Cultural change, communication networks, statements of material culture”; “Human-animal relationships Archaeozoology, domestication research, studies on the relationship between humans and animals against the background of different epochs”
Ida-Marie Corell, artist Berlin/ Obermarkersdorf
Performance: Plastic and Water Concerto for Piano and Voice
Researching the topic of the goddesses today through a contemporary female gaze inevitably brings contemporary issues into the picture, such as global warming, the return of the primordial feminine, ocean trash, plastification, native knowledge and wisdom, the privatisation of water, polarisation, healing as the new punk and spirituality as answer.
Plastic and microplastic penetrates natural circulation and has already been found in nature, space, food chains, living beings, human and animal blood, marine life, the oceans, the arctic, rivers, water and even snow: It is almost as present as spiritual minds expect the divine principle to be present in all existing matter.
Can the organism, the natural flow still carry a divine principle if this organism is permeated by plastic? Is the return of the divine mother principle the solution to global, interconnected challenges?
In this performance I will work with two predominant themes of our time—water and plastic, or the relationship between internal (water) and external (plastic). In this Concerto, water represents the possible remerging power of the goddesses of water and fertility and plastic the supremacy of capitalist logic.
The sound of the piano play, the vibration of voice and water may be understood as carriers of an energetic and emotional space, grid or link in which we are able to connect and tune into a collective future of god.desses, for a circular, gender equal, sustainable future. In the end of this performance I will leave the water wearing the plastic dress, carrying it with me to symbolically free the water from its plastic penetration.
Ida-Marie Corell is an artist, musical poet, performer, researcher, and synesthetic experimentalist working at the intersection of frequency, sound, art, and knowledge transfer. Her work is anti-, inter-, and multidisciplinary and explores synesthetic understanding and the concepts of real time, mass consumerism, identity, emotion, plastic, plastic bags, aisthesis, Sixinity, transfer, awareness, and transcendence. Corell is the founder of I BÄG YOU, an art and knowledge-transfer project about the plastic bag as an everyday object, and the cofounder of Kunstraum Retz, an exhibition space for experimental new approaches to art and culture near the former iron curtain.
Stefania Pia, DJANE Naples
Stefania Pia is an Italian multimedia artist and creative who also founded the free magazine PelleNoLeather in 2004 in Milan. She moved to New York in 2007, where she created 4EYESlab creative laboratory, which collaborates with international artisans, designers and artists. It was during this time that 4EYES was born, with her original “glitter eyebrows” sunglasses. In 2012 Paul Sevigny, the famous night impresario of New York, discovered her DJing talents and recruited her for his new bar Paul’s Baby Grand. 4EYES’ international eclectic music conquered New York and Know Wave radio, giving her the chance to create her own radio program entitled Groovy Classical, incorporating soundtracks and classical music that Pia liked to work to while producing art in her studio. Since 2010 she has been collaborating with Vogue Italia Online, and from the summer of 2018 Pia chose Palermo as a base to work from on AMERIKA 1491, a retrospective of all the American years, with works including necklaces and sculptures based on recycled and found objects, short films and photos from her archive, her FLUOminiatures, and large-scale collage paintings and tapestries.
@4EYESLAB
