OUTCAST REGISTRATION is a gender-specific arts-based research project that focuses on an issue that western European countries have consistently ignored. Although women drug addicts represent “only” 4 to 14% of Europe’s total population of drug users and are thus considered by the legal system and society as a “negligible phenomenon”, around 65% of the inmates in women’s prisons are drug addicts. How can it be that this state of affairs leads to marginalisation of this group and what has brought them into this precarious position?
Since 1997 Ulrike Möntmann has been realizing multi-year projects with partners from art, science and politics in cooperation with drug addicts in European prisons, therapy facilities and reception centers. In interdisciplinary artistic research and practice, complex issues are discussed that arise from the cooperation with all participants. The aim of the investigations is to uncover facts and to identify concrete connections from different perspectives. In doing so, neither the obvious asymmetrical relationships to the affected women can be confirmed nor the measures taken by executive violence to be discussed - pollution should become opportunities to jointly enter into the conditionality of social systems.
OUTCAST REGISTRATION is a form of intervention that requires reflection and commentary to reveal the conditions that are structurally entrenched in social processes and make them perceptible as public affairs.
lessArchive
The archive of the OUTCAST REGISTRATION documents the results of all research projects, which are audiovisually processed. The data collected during all phases of the projects enables observations and comparisons to be made of the cultural, social, geographical, and political differences as well as the numerous parallels in the lives of the project participants.
Projects
Both projects receive additional support from the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures Austria in the area of Art and Research as well as from the Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, as well as from other foundations and private sponsors.