Staging Realities – The Living Archive
From 18 to 29 August, the Living Archive projects of the Salzburg Festival Archive will be presented at the UMAK.
Archives are significant places of memory that preserve an essential part of cultural memory as repositories of knowledge and strengthen historical thinking in the present. With the repositioning of the Salzburg Festival Archive in 2024, the treasures from Festival history were already made visible in several projects. In the summer of 2026, this is followed by the development of its own archive festival, which engages with the archiving of artistic (performative) actions and presents new formats of a living archive. In contrast to the classical archive, in which the past is classified according to certain ordering structures, the Living Archive understands itself as one that overcomes the boundaries between past, present and future and brings the holdings into relationship with one another in other contexts. In this way new modes of perception are discovered, but also new sources of memory are opened up.
Laboratory for Digital Stagecraft. The Living Archive projects of the Festival Archive, which will be presented between 18 and 29 August, daily at 10:00, 12:30 and 15:45, at the UMAK – University Mozarteum at the Kurgarten, simultaneously constitute the launch of a cooperation between the Salzburg Festival, Ars Electronica and the Institute for Open Arts of the University Mozarteum Salzburg, which turns to new technologies in the context of the performing arts: Staging Realities creates a laboratory for digital stagecraft, for immersive art and new forms of storytelling in the digital age, combining creative experimentation with new tools with a critical reflection on physical presence in the art of performance. The starting point of the summer Archive Festival is the two projects created in the context of the Salzburg Festival: the S+T+ARTS®-Ec(h)o Residencies programme 2025/26 and the Memory Office in the Festival Archive begun in 2024, which are now presented to the public. Added to these is the revival of the FAUST VR Experience realised with Ars Electronica in 2023. All four projects can be experienced in a guided tour of approximately two hours through the new UMAK building.
The Installation Feeling Virtual: An Archive of Touch by the Berlin-based artist Iz Paehr [Virtual (Tactile) Grasping – An Archive of the Sense of Touch] invites visitors to feel archival materials. Iz Paehr focuses on tactile records, so that 3D models of real objects from Festival history – including costumes from the 1960 „Rosenkavalier“ production, props and costumes from „Die Zauberflöte“ (The Magic Flute) 1997 – are made accessible and experienceable as virtual objects through vibrations, tactile descriptions and touch.
Merging Visions is a two-part immersive installation by the Vienna-based artist and architect Merve Sahin, which offers a new perspective on the built environment and illuminates its constant transformation and its interlinking with nature and historical cycles, in the context of the architectural transformation of nature by the performance venues of the Salzburg Festival. The project exposes historical, cultural and ecological strata that determine the Festival complex.
Archive of Festival Experiences. Mats Staub in turn develops art projects at the intersection of theatre and exhibition, science and literature, centring on people and their life narratives. With his Festival Memory Office established especially for Salzburg, an archive of subjective Festival experiences emerges that can be accessed mimically and gesturally in a video installation and heard in parallel in condensed narratives.
Already in 2023 – on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Festival co-founder Max Reinhardt’s birth – the Archive Project FAUST 2023 was realised. Alongside the new „Faust“ production, the revival of the Virtual Reality Experience offers – at whose centre stands the virtual recreation of the famous „Faust“ city by Clemens Holzmeister for Reinhardt’s 1933 production in the Felsenreitschule – both a connection to the current Festival season and to the Living Archive focus.
