Performance by Professor María José Contreras Lorenzini Commissioned for Vienna Art Week
Vienna Art Week commissioned multidisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Theatre María José Contreras Lorenzini to provide a participatory, site-specific performance for the annual celebration, which takes over the city of Vienna from November 7 to 14, 2025. The theme for 2025 Art Week is Learning Systems.
Contreras Lorenzini's performance, The Museum of Unlearning, invites audiences to engage with the disarming question, "If you were to unlearn one thing, what would it be?" and consider unlearning not as a loss, but a necessary step toward growth. The performance takes over the ORF Radio Building in the city's centrally located fourth district. Audiences will travel from room to room, encountering performers who urge them to reckon with that central question.
When organizers Robert Punkenhofer and Işın Önol commissioned Contreras Lorenzini to create a performance, she "began with a simple but provocative question: what if learning also requires unlearning? What if, to truly learn, we must first let go—of ingrained habits, inherited narratives, and unconscious biases that shape our personal and collective histories?" Contreras Lorenzini said.
Audiences will help create the exhibit as the week goes on, contributing writing, drawing, and markings on vessels in the venue. "Together, they trace a fragile yet powerful map of shared memories, vulnerabilities, and possibilities for reimagining what we might need to release in order to learn otherwise," said Contreras Lorenzini.
The annual Vienna Art Week brings together art from the Baroque period to contemporary for local and international audiences to enjoy and activate. Admission is free.
María José Contreras is a Chilean multidisciplinary artist and scholar working in the international field of theatre and performance. She operates at the intersection of research and art, exploring the interrelations and frictions between embodied practice, performance, memory, and urban space. Her commitment to decolonizing theatre-making, teaching, and research is recognized in The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader (London: Routledge, 2020), an international volume featuring 73 leading global artists pioneering innovative approaches to performance. She has co-edited Cadáver exquisito: tres experiencias de investigación performativa en Chile (Oso Liebre, 2020) and Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). Her forthcoming book, Viscous Performances: The Persistence of Creative Resistance in Neoliberal Chile, will be published by Duke University Press.
Before joining the faculty at Columbia, Contreras Lorenzini served as Associate Professor at Universidad Católica de Chile, where she chaired the PhD Program in Arts, and as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU.