Trachtensaal

The Folklore Museum is home to one of the few remaining “traditional costume rooms” – an uncomfortable legacy of the 1930s. Theatrical, lifeless, eerie – this is how the 42 figurines sometimes appear. The traditional costume hall embodied the ideal of a homogeneous “national community”: as a rural, anti-modern and German-Styrian one. This idea of a “naturally” grown uniform identity was now archived through a spatial intervention. The displacement and packaging of the display cases pushes back the staging of the imagined self and creates space for current perspectives on the Trachtensaal: in the display cases, in the mural by Franz Konrad and in the video by Masoud Razavy Pour.