Freda Fiala

Recent Activities

○ In early December 2025, our ERC project held its first international symposium “OLFAC” at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk) Vienna. Over three days, scholars and artists traced how smells intervene in cultural, aesthetic, and political formations. The conversations approached smell not as an object but as a force – one that reorganises archives, rearranges what can be made perceptible, and invites alternative futures of knowing.
My contribution, Camphor’s Crossings: Extractive Histories and Memory Cultures, followed camphor’s sharp, medicinal scent through centuries of governance, trade, and environmental transformation in Taiwan. Drawing on fieldwork across museums, heritage sites, and artistic practices, I discussed how camphor persists as both material and mnemonic, carrying the afterlives of Indigenous dispossession, shifting labour regimes, and transmodern industrial expansion.

○ On 15 November 2025, I co-organised and co-hosted the symposium Ambivalente Ordnungen at MuseumsQuartier Wien, together with the Austrian Association of Curators (AAC). The panel I moderated centred on the responsibilities embedded in giving – and giving back – within current debates on provenance research and restitution in Austrian museums. Rather than approaching “return” as an administrative act, the discussion asked what forms of relation, care, and accountability become possible in ongoing processes of becoming together.
My thanks go to Claudia Banz (Weltmuseum Wien), Matthias Beitl (Volkskundemuseum Wien), Pia Schölnberger (BMWKMS), and Vanessa Spanbauer, whose insights opened generous pathways into thinking the future museum otherwise.

○ A different but connected set of conversations evolved at the conference Museums in Motion: New Frontiers in Chinese Museum Studies I attended in Arezzo, Italy. Colleagues approached East Asia’s rapidly transforming museum landscape through curatorial histories, transcultural entanglements, and shifting “global” heritage politics. I am grateful for the depth of these exchanges, which continue to resonate with my ongoing work.

○ The Summer School of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Prague allowed me to join a wonderful cohort of scholars for intensive exchange. My contribution traced Austria-Hungary’s late-nineteenth-century expansionist imaginaries, with a particular focus on China’s involvement and the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition. These inquiries continue to inform my wider research into genealogies of extraction, revealing how material histories, display cultures, and imperial ambitions remain entangled.

○  In February and March 2025, my ongoing work with OLFAC has taken me back to Taipei, where I spent time conducting archival research into camphor’s colonial histories. During this period, I was invited to give guest lectures at the National Taipei University of Arts (NTUA), Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and the University of Melbourne in Naarm/Melbourne.
While in Melbourne, I attended the triennial Asia TOPA festival, which became the subject of a review I contributed to ARTFORUM, reflecting on the festival’s shifting curatorial landscape and its negotiations of regional specificity. You can read my review here.

○  Last year, my participation in the writer’s residency of Kyoto Experiment was quite formative – an initiative organised by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan and operated by the Goethe-Institut Tokyo, with support from Kyoto Experiment and the Saison Foundation. The residency culminated in several outcomes:
– a reflective piece titled Kyoto Experiment 2024: Kansai’s “fringe institution” has turned 15
– a radio feature for Ö1 Kulturjournal aired on 24 October 2024
– and a review in German for Theater der Zeit, Eine Wette auf die Zukunft. Das Kyoto Experiment Festival – die wichtigste japanische Fringe-Institution (“A Bet on the Future. Kyoto Experiment Festival – the most relevant Japanese fringe institution”), published in the January 2025 issue.