03 2017
The Zurich Gessnerallee Theatre as a platform for rightwing ideologies?
Without us.
Call to an audience strike!
Boycott the two-part event “Die neue Avantgarde” on March 10 and 17, 2017!
We are being addressed by the event “Die neue Avantgarde” (The New Avantgarde) and invited to participate in a preliminary conversation intended to negotiate a panel session that gives the AfD (the rightwing “Alternative for Germany”) a platform and solely features representatives of ultra-right, neoconservative and liberal interests and rhetoric. Migrant, postmigrant, leftist, POC and feminist dissent is not represented on the panel and is instead being invited to play along as a reacting audience in the guise of “participation.” We are in a theatre!
Sold as a harmless “experiment” this panel enables the AfD to advance and test their party and ideological program in the public arena. This program decidedly curtails emancipatory movements and uses populist and cynical rhetoric to distort, twist and divide the public perception of emancipatory movements to its own benefit (political correctness bashing). We do not want to perform preliminary work for them as voters or in any form of participatory involvement.
Despite fundamental critique coming from the immediate context and the open letter published on February 24, 2017, Gessnerallee continues to evade responsibility for giving the AfD a stage. A preliminary conversation is being orchestrated in order to legitimize the event, instrumentalizing the audience to decide on whether the podium should take place.
Therefore, we are calling for everyone to counteract the two-part event “Die neue Avantgarde” (March 10 and 17, 2017) with strategic disinterest and to boycott both! The team working at The Gessnerallee is also invited to boycott!
"Silence can be a plan rigorously
executed (...)
It is a presence, it has a history, a form.
Do not confuse it with any kind of absence."
Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language