The darker side of the Akademie is an initiative, that comes from the process of working at the book “Vocabulary of decoloniality”, taken within the Academy of fine arts Vienna, which wants to expose the precarious condition on which most of the non-European students find themselves, though they are studying in one of the most privileged institution of Europe, due to forms of exclusion mechanisms and discriminative structures. The intention is to deconstruct the vision of what it means to study in an art school and to make visible and to contest the discrimination that are still part of an institution that presents itself as critical and progressive.

The work of the group was made public through different strategies such a tour/intervention within the Academy in Schillerplatz, where a letter addressed to the rectorate was read out loud before its submission to the office; an installation that could be visited during the four days of the Open Doors of the Academy of Fine Arts (21-24 January 2011) which includs a studying desk with the voluminous visa information a third country student needs to recollect and the hanging of the letter that copied the style of the official letter of the university, including a reinterpretation of its institutional logo, which we also used in stickers and postcards.

As an outcome of our interventions we have been invited to talk with the rectorate. After some months we could witness to some changes in the Akademie structure such as the complete translation of Academy web site in english and the establishment of  the department for political anti-racist practises.