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4.5 Participation level: demand-based

It is still quite rare for a cultural mediation project to be initiated in response to an approach by an interest group requesting a project. One of the mere handful of examples in the German-speaking region is the creation of the 2004 exhibition  Gastarbajteri – 40 years of Labour Migration at Wien Museum [Vienna Museum]. The Gastarbajteri exhibition explored part of Austrian history through the lens of economic migration, a topic the museum had not addressed until then. The impetus for the exhibition came in the form of a request from the association  Initiative Minderheiten [Initiative Minorities], which also collaborated in the exhibition’s development. In this case, by requesting an exhibition, the association was pursuing the aim of  representation – seeking visibility for an interest group which had been left out of official historiography. It was demanding equal treatment for a group constituting part of Austrian society, but it also wanted to influence how that group was depicted in the exhibition. These ideas, for their part, had consequences for the cultural mediation programme associated with the exhibition, which the museum contracted out to the independent collective  Büro trafo.K. Büro trafo.K. worked with the initiators to design an extensive programme of guided tours and workshops which reinforced the demand-based nature of the exhibition and its development: creating “counter-narratives” challenging the predominant public forms of representation and historical imagery.