FREIHEIT? NEIN! DANKE!

In 2025, ROMB Verein developed the annual programme FREIHEIT? NEIN! DANKE! as a critical reflection on the contemporary use — and misuse — of the idea of freedom. The title does not reject freedom itself, but questions its empty circulation as slogan, promise, commodity and political instrument. What kind of freedom is being offered? Who is allowed to define it? And what remains of freedom when it is reduced to individual choice, consumption, visibility or control? The programme unfolded through artistic projects, public encounters and transnational collaborations, linking ecological, social and spatial questions with the politics of perception. Rather than treating public space as a neutral background, FREIHEIT? NEIN! DANKE! approached it as a contested field: a place where bodies, images, infrastructures, memories and economic forces constantly negotiate what may appear, what may be shared and what remains excluded.

The two main projects realised within the programme were ATACAMA FASHION and SZ ON SZUM. Both works addressed systems of dependency and disappearance — from the hidden environmental costs of fast fashion to the fragile acoustic and material traces of place, memory and control. Despite a significant reduction of the originally planned budget, the programme generated a lasting impact beyond its immediate realisation. It opened new artistic, institutional and international connections and laid the groundwork for ROMB’s subsequent research into urban imagination, collective memory and the politics of space. In this context, TOPO emerged in Graz as a first experimental platform — a format that would later develop into ROMB’s 2026 annual programme POST FICTION.