Flood the Zone with Courage

The climate crisis escalates, but the systems meant to address it falter. Science sounds the alarm while political action lags behind. Across the globe, democratic structures are eroding, disinformation thrives, and fear is weaponized to divide. In this atmosphere of perpetual crisis, urgency no longer galvanizes—it overwhelms. What once sparked resistance now often leads to resignation.
Flood the Zone with Courage is a call to break that paralysis. A collaboration between Ars Electronica and the Circus of Knowledge at JKU Linz, the project invites artists, activists, students, and citizens to develop new forms of protest—performative, participatory, and radically collective. At its core are a series of maximum 7-minute interventions, each one a brief but charged moment of action: a dance, a dialogue, a rupture, a ritual. Some unfold in the main festival venue at POSTCITY, others take to the streets and squares of Linz—transforming everyday spaces into sites of civic imagination.
This is protest not just against something, but for something. Inspired by thinkers like Judith Butler and Hannah Arendt, the project understands protest as the physical manifestation of democracy—not merely symbolic dissent, but embodied vision. It asks, how can protest become a tool not only of disruption, but of creation? How can performance activate public space as a laboratory for shared futures?
The interventions resist passive spectatorship. They demand engagement, disrupt routines, and invite participation—whether through collective singing, communal meals, voting rituals, or encounters that cross language, class, and cultural divides. They are provocations, but also proposals: gestures that test what democracy could feel like.
The Pavilion against Indifference, designed and realized by the Department of Architecture at the University of Arts Linz, functions as the physical center of the project in POSTCITY. It is both stage and gathering point. At the core of the pavilion, the Open Democracy Lab by IG Demokratie becomes a space for collaborative reflection and democratic repair. Over five days, visitors are invited to rethink political structures through methods drawn from sociocracy and participatory facilitation.
Other interventions translate protest into movement, light, and interaction. LUM:ORA, a performance conceived by Teach For Austria, highlights language as a collective tool of inclusion. Children and young adults use light signals to transmit a symbolic word, inviting audiences to join and learn together.
With Laughing Strategies, the ATI Collective and the department of space&designstrategies at the University of Arts Linz examine the politics of laughter—probing its potential as both resistance and retreat. Dancers from A!KO Tanz Fest respond to digital visibility and data agency through choreographic interventions that unfold unexpectedly in physical space.
Meanwhile, the Youth Exchange Project brings together young people from across Europe to develop subtle and participatory forms of protest—some visible, others so embedded in the festival experience that visitors may already be part of them without knowing. Let’s flood the zone with courage.