Ausländer raus! Schlingensiefs Container

For one week, Christoph Schlingensief realised a vision of fear in the middle of Vienna's tourist centre: a deportation container for asylum seekers, interactively influenceable, filled around the clock with racist speeches by the successful FPÖ figure Jörg Haider and plastered with his xenophobic election posters. Thousands of passers-by became agitated on site and thus became players in Schlingensief's production. A mock play that stirred up ‘the new Europe’ and the ‘black sheep of the EU’ Austria in particular.

As part of the Vienna Festival, Christoph Schlingensief had the container with 12 asylum seekers placed directly in front of the opera. Under the slogan ‘Foreigners out!’, one resident could be ‘deported’ every day by voting on the Internet. In the form of the then much-discussed media perversion of a surveillance container in the style of ‘Big Brother’, the world public was to be confronted with the increasing global emergence of a new right-wing bias.