Soft Culture 

or

On Flexible Bodies and Overwhelming Ideas

We cordially invite you to a peripatetic lecture and performance

Soft Culture
or
On Flexible Bodies and Overwhelming Ideas

by Viktor Čech and Zuzana Žabková

which will take place on Friday, April 24, 2026, at 6:00 p.m.

We will meet in the main courtyard of Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier (Hof 1), in the middle at the back.
The event will last approximately one hour.

Can places and spaces serve as repositories not only of material memory but also of embodied historical memory?  Is it possible to reconstruct the story of a given city, country, or culture from these trajectories and intersections of past bodies—their movements, choreographies of clusters of people or solitary individuals? 

Can this help us find answers to historical traumas of modernism that still resonate in Austrian and Central European society? Such as the legacy of fascism, nazism, and intolerance, as well as unfulfilled or warped dreams and utopias, followed by decades of historical amnesia.  

This peripatetic lecture and performance will attempt to answer these questions. It will draw on two fields where the aesthetics and politics of corporeality and movement serve as a fundamental starting point: choreography and monumental sculpture. Specifically, it will be based on encounters with a few examples of interwar avant-garde dance and Austrian sculpture of the time. 

Together, the theorist and the artist will guide you on a brief journey through a series of encounters with past bodies, where history intersects with contemporary cultural and political issues.  

The performative lecture will take place in a creative dialogue between theorist  Viktor Čech and artist and choreographer Zuzana Žabková.

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Acknowledgments: MQ Wien