<Scream from the Academy> is a trilogy of written works.
The prelude of the trilogy "Ein Bericht für eine Akademie" (2020) was published in limited copies.
PART I. "Not Working is Working" (2022) is an academic essay written for Austrians and EU/EEA citizens. The piece deals with the harm inflicted by the non-doing of a bureau that is pretending to work for foreigners. If you already live in Austria and are a foreigner you might be puzzled as to why academic writing is even needed to explain such a banal life experience that many undergo and is of no secret. The piece is written solely for those who are only academically interested in the life of others, in a jargon they understand. The piece has been published in "Re-Activating Critical Thinking in the Midst of Necropolitical Realities: For Radical Change", Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The PDF copy of the piece can be sent via email per request.
PART II. "Art of Proposal" (2022) is a critique of the neo-liberalization in the art field and the resulting project culture, which pushes artists to make false promises of the outcome before the production process occurs. The work questions the conditions of knowledge production today by archiving declined and deferred applications together with those chosen to be funded. The work questions what kind of contemporaneity is imbued in the language of proposal writing and interrogates the hierarchy between written expressions (proposal / the poetry on proposition) and that between written and visual forms of art. The work aims to offer a space to pause in front of the accumulating lists of authorized knowledge and the authorizing parties involved in the economy, reflecting on the mandatory submission of an accumulated CV, a performance record, and the currently ongoing debate at the Academy on a cumulative dissertation for a Ph.D. The piece won the Cathrin Pichler Prize 2022 and was recognized to have artistically intervened in scientific discourse production. The PDF copy is available below.
PART III. "Apolitical Act in 3 Parts" (2023) is a closet drama that follows the narrative of a South Korean Ph.D. student in contemporary Vienna, whose mental state gradually deteriorates as her institutional critique is endorsed by a high-profile institution through winning a prize. While trying to fight this natural course of affairs of internalization (institutionalization), the protagonist continues her every day as delusion erodes her mind. The 2nd and 3rd Acts are a literary dedication to <Diary of a Madman> written by Nikolaj Gogol (1835) and a short story of the same title by Lu Xun (1918). Due to the backdrop of the play, the original text features Korean and English together with German. The foreign lines have been translated into English and italicized for differentiation. There is no intermission between the Acts.
—Act 1. <Apolitical Act in 3 Parts> illustrates an encounter between an immigrant and a student who have long been friends. In a quiet square, the student practices a speech, the immigrant listens with half an ear, and you read.
—Act 2. <Diary of a Madman> takes the form of a woman going through schizophrenic paranoia. As the previous Diaries (of a Madman) did, this Act also attempts to capture a deranged mind with words, and at the same time, provide a picture of the landscape in which the insane navigates.
—Act 3. <Spawning> presents a narrative of a woman who left ‘the best city to live in’ with only half of her remains. She looks back on the memories and people of the city.
