What could you do with 19 billion euro?
Give it away to a corrupt and failing bank or build a new city?
Stay tuned for a dramatic and cultural protest.
We will see more of those exciting dancers later in this segment.
While strolling through Vienna one evening I wanted to get a twilight view of one of
the city's greatest architectural landmarks, the Karlskirche.
And it's particularly beautiful at twilight.
So I got there just at the right time, but then I was surprised and at first a little
disappointed, by all sorts of activities happening in front of the church which I thought were
going to be interfering with my enjoyment of the sublime experience – and then I realized
that something really wonderful and fantastic was going on.
This was a political protest done with great artistic creativity: architecture students,
musicians, lecturers, philosophers, intellectuals and dancers coming together to protest a major
banking scandal that took place in Austria.
The Austrian taxpayers bailed out a major bank, Hypo Alpe Adria, in 2009 back in the
heat of the financial crisis, by nationalizing it at the cost to taxpayers of €19 billion
– that equals about $25 billion.
€19 billion is such a large amount of money that it's very hard for people to visualize
how much it really represents, and therefore this group of students from the Technical
University of Vienna got together and decided to build a model city that could hold 100,000
inhabitants, and which could be constructed at a cost of €19 billion – a much better
use of money, they feel, than bailing out a failed bank.
The special exhibit was in place for 19 days in October of 2014 right at Karlsplatz, and
fortunately the evening I was there a special dance performance was being conducted as part
of the symbolic protest with the dancer from Easter Island doing a traditional war dance
and backed up by a local Viennese modern dancer with her own interpretation to accompany it.
A return visit during the daytime revealed it a little more clearly and gave a chance
to read the information billboard.
The exhibition generated international interest and attracted thousands of visitors, but only
a few local politicians showed up.
And there was a series of lectures and discussions being held on a regular basis during the course
of the exhibit.
This was a major teaching opportunity and the organizers hope that this visualization
of the financial losses incurred will not just educate and inform, but lead directly
to tangible change.
They call it a protest in concrete.
In a story published on their website they explain why they are trying to educate the
public, because they said it was not the scale of the bailout that was so surprising, but
more shocking was the reaction of the Austrian population – because there was no reaction.
Despite a petition they only got 150,000 signatures which is nothing in Austria – there are
8 million people living here.
The problem is such a large amount of money is difficult to understand.
You cannot visualize it, so they wanted to provide a better way of helping people to
understand the huge waste involved, and show them something tangible – show them what
Austria could've done with the money instead, so they built the city.
One of the participants explained for us more about what's going on here.
The students made this in order to make this visible, a sum of money that was, that disappeared
from the city in a bank scandal.
This was money that somehow disappeared, you know, in the flux of capital that now is immaterial,
and the distorted representative of neo-liberal capitalism.
So, the students decided to make this visible through buildings, and also making the whole
translation of the city for 100,000 people.
19 billion.
And with this money you could build a city for 100,000 people.
We came here to support it through a nice invitation, because we are dealing also with
the issues of types of control, extreme forms of capitalism, and peace, and Cold War.
Talking about war in Europe, but also the imagination of war and the ideas around war,
and related to tourism, so that's very interesting for you, in Polynesia, with war and war dances.
So we have hula kahiko, and we have different interpretations, and the pieces are contemporary
accounts of these dances and topics that are important now.
Like for example what Europe is doing with the frontiers, the masses of people that are
moving and want to come into Europe, and how the system keeps them away.
It's militarized, and many people in Europe don't know about how it works.
So for example that's one of the dances.