This artistic research project investigates the Austrian „Kaiserfilm“ – a popular genre of postwar cinema produced between 1951 and 1958 – as a central cultural mechanism in the reconstruction of Austrian identity after National Socialism. These films, most notably the „Sissi“-trilogy, presented the era of Kaiser Franz Joseph I. as Austria’s „last happy time“, displacing the recent Nazi past and replacing it with an aestheticized imperial imagery. In doing so, the Kaiserfilm contributed to the production of a collective memory structured by nostalgia, historical escapism, and the normalization of imperial and colonial hierarchies.
The project approaches the Kaiserfilm not only as a cinematic genre but as a visual and sonic archive in which colonial and imperial power persists in spectral form. Drawing on postcolonial theory (Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, bell hooks), discourse analysis (Michel Foucault), and Jacques Derrida’s concept of „Hauntology“, the research examines how these films construct a depoliticized image of empire, erase colonial violence, and reproduce racialized and hierarchical worldviews that continue to shape Austrian cultural identity, tourism, and political symbolism to this day.
At the core of the project lies an artistic research methodology in which artistic practice itself functions as a mode of knowledge production. The analytical process is inseparable from the creation of an installation that operates as an epistemic device. Using archival film material, sound fragments, and algorithmic transformations, the installation will translate the aesthetic and ideological structures of the Kaiserfilm into a spatial and perceptual environment. Rather than merely illustrating research findings, the installation constitutes a form of inquiry: it exposes latent power relations, temporal disjunctions, and spectral continuities that cannot be fully articulated through discursive analysis alone.
By integrating artistic production and theoretical reflection, the project contributes to artistic research as a distinct epistemological framework. It demonstrates how installation art can function as a critical research instrument capable of producing new forms of historical and political knowledge. The project thus expands existing scholarship on Austrian postwar cinema by foregrounding its colonial and imperial dimensions and by mobilizing artistic practice as a method for critically interrogating cultural memory and its visual regimes.