On the one hand, Kulm is a mountain, just under a thousand metres high and one of the most prominent landmarks in the north of Eastern Styria. On the other hand, K.U.L.M. is an artist and curator collective that has been implementing socially oriented projects for more than ten years. With their processual work and an exhibition as part of steirischer herbst, the K.U.L.M. collective takes a self-reflective look at cultural cells in the rural area in the periphery of eastern Austria.
K.U.L.M. see themselves consciously as a counter-model to big-city culture, developing modules and formats that focus and provoke dynamics and mechanisms of the suburban area: „Peripheral Structures“ is as much a session of self-analysis as an artistic object reflecting the breaking tests of collective work – action spaces and obstacles, exchange and exclusion, inside and outside.

Installation (walk-in wall object ca. 26x12x5 m, cardboard, scaffolding, model, 3 video loops 1/3/2 min. 2 photographs 1,6×1,2 m, text and various small materials)

Participants: K.U.L.M., Daniel Hafner, Doris Rothauer, Wolfgang Ullrich
Concept: K.U.L.M. Collective (Petra Busswald, Richard+Reserl Frankenberger, Gertraud Ranegger-Strempfl, Gottfried Ranegger, Klaus Schafler)
Shown at: Kunsthalle Feldbach, steirischer herbst, 2006 rovoke the vision of a system of globally connected modules of public social spaces counterbalancing the gated-community tendencies.

Excerpt from Wolfgang Ullrich (DE) „What is Not-Art?“
on K.U.L.M. Peripheral Structures, 2006:
(…) Instead of striving to land in the Centers, they -like the initiators of K.U.L.M.- find it more interesting to make a stop on the border between Art and Not-Art. For them, it’s through small bordertown traffic running it’s course what the Centers pre-eminently orchestrate. For them, the recognized artistic activity combines with social, handcraft or scientific activity in a unified conglomerate. The separation between Art and Not-Art is thus irrelevant. Together, both combine to form a singular ever-changing field.
Perhaps one could describe this borderzone as the true place of subculture, a place which is commonly defined as the place between the established and not-established. However, the thesis appears possible that nowhere otherwise does the character of art reveal itself so clearly as here. If Art and Not-Art have anyway become undifferentiatable, then projects like K.U.L.M. become exemplaric of this.
Here, there are no sensational features when Not-Art becomes Art:
instead of speculating on the inverse heights to fall that emerge in the upgrading of the profane to high-art, it is more about a state of „floating“. With this, the question „Art or Not-Art?“ in the end loses meaning and transforms into the cry „Art and Not-Art!“. The shifting between the categories which takes place in projects like K.U.L.M. naturally -and in the Art-World a bit more bluntly or dramatically- does not only concern the breadth of terminology of Art. Moreover, it is also the content of the terminlogy which is opened up wider than ever before.(…)

Wolfgang Ullrich (Ger), Author, Lecturer and Business Consultant. Publications on the history and critique of the art terminology, modern images and prosperity phenomena.