Democrazy

→ Bringing about a local political initiative by democratic means seems to be more difficult than expected. A small brochure illustrates our attempt to establish contact with Viennese local politicians.

Crazy Democracy

As part of a project to study the development of democracy in today's world, we tried to find out what it takes to make a change in our residential area. The specific reason for this was to find out how easy it is for individual citizens to have a productive conversation with local politicians. It turned out that it was not as easy as leaflets, commercials and information material suggest. Since not all team members live in the same area, we decided to conduct a survey in a Viennese coffee house. The idea was to include the results of this survey in the political discourse to find out how an original idea is treated by the official side.

The Booklet

After two weeks of never-ending attempts to reach conversation partners, we initially had to overturn the project's objectives. Since we were so surprised by our experiences, we felt it was necessary to express these experiences in a final product. Just an example: We were invited to a so-called «Grätzel Meeting». A «Grätzel Meeting» is a way for citizens to get involved in the political process in a productive manner. The «Grätzel Meeting» announced at the address of an retirement home took place in March at around 5 degrees Celsius outside the venue. The first hypothermic retirees left the poorly announced event after a few minutes. This was just one of many experiences on our way that felt a little clumsy. To document our findings and difficulties, we decided to tell our story illustratively in a short, sarcastic brochure.

Credits

This project was co-created by Camilla Giani and Elena Doncev.