At the HochSommer Festival 2025,

the project axis crosses the borderline of the divided city of Bad Radkersburg / Gornja Radgona, which defines the focus of the artistic works on display.

The artistic manifestations can be found at several locations in Bad Radkersburg and Gornja Radgona.

In the performance MISU, Aiko Kazuko Kurosaki [JP/AT] connects the “districts” by walking across the Mur Bridge and shares the fundamental element of water with the audience in a performative reduction to the basis of life for all living beings. In this, water as a connecting common element contrasts with the water of the Mur as a dividing strand through the city.

The timeless slowness is contrasted with the cross-border FLOW of staged youth culture, realized by GoodLee [AT] with young people from Murska Sobota and Bad Radkersburg.

Its global, synchronising flow of the present contrasts with the intensifying conflicts in small regional and national disputes, which, in some cases, escalate into wars, cramming people into artificial groups and ethnicities, separating them from each other and from social and communicative networks and lines of connection, and staging separation with virtual borders.

The broken connections between shores and cultures can be explored –

In the three-part installation “Trace the Connection” by Gertrude Moser-Wagner [AT], pieces of railroad tracks are installed on both sides of the Mur River and in the customs house on the Austrian side.

In the customs house, different aspects of [dis]connection can be read.

With the knotted objects, which were handmade from 8 km of string during the coronavirus lockdown, Michaela Vrbkova [CZ] addresses the virtual boundaries of political and social isolation of “others” from a very personal perspective of their impact and effects.

These are also traces that can be traced, read, and exchanged.

GIVE and TAKE

GIVE and TAKE is the inconspicuous exchange of traces of human existence, where small, hand-signed works of art by Michaela Vrbkova can be freely taken and small objects from one’s own memory or family history can be given away, borrowed for printing – stories exchanged, traces recorded.

The objects [given] by visitors are recorded by Verena Tscherner [AT] with a 3D scanner, entered into the digital memory, and incorporated as 3D-printed replicas into installations as individual “trace elements” in the coming times and stages of the FLUVIALE. With her objects in the Zollhaus, she shows the limits of breathability—between life, death, and the artificial reanimation of the deceased with respirated images.

This broadens the view from the constraints of political borders to the boundaries and traces of [biological] existence. This is also the starting point for the works of Alfred Hruschka [AT], in which legacies, vines, and literal trace images, rusty imprints of human and animal tracks from the past, can be read.

Jennifer DeFelice [US/CZ] takes an even bigger step back with Wald.grenzen (Forest Boundaries), to the planetary traces that can be seen from space, manifesting the negative aspect of global developments on a digital screen.

At the end of the tour, the path leads through the garage, where Kerstin Bennier’s ONE – ist the lonliest number, a manifestation of isolation or the last existing specimen, crouches on the wall. A thin-skinned sculpture of a forgotten stuffed animal, a memory image that will hopefully remain a bleak dream for a long time to come.

” ONE – is the lonliest number” by Kerstin Bennier