Our cut version of the film Straitjacket, nominated for the Hubert Sielecki Prize, was screened as part of the Künstlerhaus Kino Spektrum program on October 14.2026 at Stadtkino Wien.

The Italian-Czech-Austrian artist collective Brenner-Havelka-Plessl was formed during their shared studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna – a place to which they now consciously return with the performance Straitjacket. In a space that once served as a site of learning, the collective now appears as a performing unit before a new generation of students – observed, sketched, studied.

The straitjacket, made of paper and linen fragments, is put on and tightened until movement becomes possible only as a form of inner tension. The performance negotiates the precarious balance between artistic self-empowerment and structural pressure – between mutual support and self-imposed limitation.

Referencing Thomas Bernhard’s notion of the “straitjacket of a world career,” the work reveals how the desire to live from one’s art can turn into compulsion. The collective presents itself as vulnerable and entangled – tightly bound within a system it simultaneously critiques, inhabits, and challenges.