KRAMPUS
Dialogue
Each speaker selects a work from the exhibition and discusses these before and with the audience. An open dialogue between various perspectives, with music and inspired by the exhibition.
Lisa Noggler-Gürtler, historian
Lisa Noggler-Gürtler heads the Museum der Völker in Schwaz. In 2019, she examined the Krampus in an exhibition entitled “Ungeheuer Wild”, which dealt with the unknown, inexplicable, and untamed. “We chanced upon this topic through one of Gert Chesis’s films about a ‘Krampus’ in West Africa that looked exactly like the one familiar to us here in Austria. As soon as you start looking for wild figures, monsters, and hybrid beasts, they can pop up everywhere and anytime.”
Nikolaus Wandinger, theologian
Nikolaus Wandinger studied theology and philosophy in Innsbruck, San Francisco and Berkeley. Guest lectures took him to the Universities of London, Tübingen or Dublin, among others. Today he heads the Department of Systematic Theology at the University of Innsbruck. Prof. Wandinger is President of the Bulletin of the Colloquium on Violence & Religion.
Michael Fuchs, horror movie expert
The Krampus made a career in Hollywood with several horror movies and in 2014 left an incredulous audience aghast when Oscar winner Christoph Waltz joined Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show and described the Krampus’s traditional role in Austria as Saint Nicholas’s monstrous helper who threatens naughty children with a switch and in the worst-case scenario stuffs them in a sack.
Michael Fuchs is an expert on the media phenomenon of the Krampus. He got his doctorate at the University of Graz with a dissertation about horror cinema and is currently a research associate at the Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck.
Matthias Kessler, Luca Staffelbach
The two percussionists respond with the diversity of their instruments to the conversation of the expert panel in the INN SITU dialogue. Matthias and Luca are the founding members of the ensemble TrioColores. Since January 2022, Matthias Kessler has been a solo timpanist of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra. Luca Staffelbach is an experienced soloist as well as chamber, orchestra and band musician. He has played in concert houses such as the Philharmonie Berlin, the KKL Luzern, or the Tonhalle Zürich.
