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Free anti-racism tattoo offer nearly ruins Austrian artist

An Austrian tattoo artist whose offer of free anti-racism tattoos attracted worldwide headlines has said he was nearly financially ruined after receiving hundreds of requests that took half a year to complete.

Published: 27 July 2016 09:32 CEST

Free anti-racism tattoo offer nearly ruins Austrian artist

Facebook/Pride & Glory

Tattoo artist Alexander Smoltschnik, who runs the Pride & Glory studio in Graz, announced the offer in June 2015 as a message of anti-racism and tolerance.

It followed the tragedy in Graz when a Bosnian man deliberately ploughed his car into a pedestrian shopping street, killing three people.

“Immediately a certain group of people were labelled as having negative characteristics,” the 47-year-old said at the time.

In a recent interview with Kleine Zeitung he added: “At some point, I could not watch any more as I was bombarded with so much unfiltered hostility. I almost couldn't bear it. I'm an artist after all and therefore by nature sensitive.”

After posting the offer on Facebook, Smoltschnik expected ten or fifteen people might get in touch but he was inundated with hundreds of requests.

“I was completely overwhelmed but there was no going back for me, that would have been cowardly,” he said this month.

“I have not counted how many there were in the end. But I have worked on the free tattoos until the middle of December.”

He said that the emotional and financial cost of having to spend his time doing so many free tattoos nearly ruined him as at one point he struggled to pay rent for the studio.

“The whole thing brought me to to my emotional and financial limits and then some more,” he said.

A year after he announced the offer, Smoltschnik posted online that “unfortunately things still have not changed” regarding intolerance in the world but he was happy he did what he did.

“On a large scale, I could not perhaps change anything – just a small part. That makes me happy,” he said.

How widespread is racism in Austria?

At first glance, the statistics look encouraging. Just over 1,300 incidents with a racist motive were reported to the Austrian non-government organisation ZARA last year – a drop from just under 1,500 reported the previous year and half as many as 2020 when a record 3,000 racist incidents were reported.

The spike in incidents from 2020 is thought to be connected to people spending more time online in the first pandemic year and due to the issue being in the public eye as part of the Black Lives Matter movement sparked after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the US.

However, Rita Isiba, who heads up ZARA, warned that many cases go undetected because some victims fear the wider implications of reporting offences.

During the presentation on Wednesday of the new report into racism and discrimination, Isiba said racism is part of everyday life in Austria for people of colour and is not an individual problem, but a social one.

The report shows “how deeply rooted racism still is in many areas of life in Austria”, Isiba said.

Particularly in the education system, the healthcare system, when in contact with the police and the workplace, there is clear racism and discrimination, the report found.

ZARA provided 1,708 counselling appointments to victims when racism was reported, and took legal measures or other interventions 702 times.

READ ALSO: Muslims and black people discriminated against in Austria, report reveals

Where is racism happening in Austria?

Of the 1,302 reports documented by ZARA in 2023, 58 percent concerned racist incidents online. But researchers pointed out that there can be a blurry line between online incidents and in-person incidents.

Head of the counselling centres, Fiorentina Azizi-Hacker mentioned one example of a black woman contacting ZARA because she had been subjected to racist and sexist insults as well as threats by her online dating contact.

After she said she was not interested in meeting up again after the first date, he bombarded her with messages in which he threatened to sexually assault her daughter, among other things.

The office attributed 15.9 percent of cases to the “public sphere”, 11 percent to incidents involving “goods and services”, 8.4 percent to state authorities and institutions, 4.5 percent to the police, 1.6 percent to politics and the media and 0.4 percent to the world of work. Formal complaints were only lodged in four out of 58 cases of alleged racist police violence.

It comes after a report released by the European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) found Austria and Germany were among the worst EU countries for racism.

A total of 76 percent of respondents in Germany and 72 percent in Austria reported experiencing discrimination in the past five years due to their skin colour, origin, or religion.

READ ALSO: Austria ranks among ‘worst’ EU countries for racism

Language ‘bans’ at school

The anti-discrimination organisation ZARA slammed the system around Austria’s so-called German support classes or Deutschförderklassen.

Teacher Ali Dönmez said the issue is that pupils are segregated based on their language skills and the MIKA-D test required for categorisation places too much importance on grammar.

Dönmez pointed out that the way Austrian schools deal with multilingualism is generally a problem. He described several cases where children and young people were forbidden to speak Turkish or Arabic or were even penalised for doing so.

But younger people are often afraid to report the problems in case teachers are informed.

“There is a legitimate concern that the situation will get worse if they report it,” said Dönmez.

Austrian government shelves racism action plan

ZARA’s Rita Isiba issued fresh calls for the Austrian government to kick start its National Action Plan against Racism (NAP).

However, it has emerged that the coalition government – made up of the Greens and Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) has shelved it.

When Social Affairs Minister Johannes Rauch (Greens) was asked about the NAP, he said the government “won’t get round to it” before the election later this year, reported the Kurier.

According to Austrian broadcaster ORF, Rauch said the responsibility for the plan lay with Integration and Women’s Affairs Minister Susanne Raab (ÖVP).

“We would like to see much more speed in the creation and coordination of this plan,” said Rauch, criticising his coalition partners. The Green ministries had “done their homework and have already taken important measures in their areas of responsibility”, said Rauch.

Isiba said their agency would “continue to work to bring Austria closer to a society that is critical of racism”, when asked about the cancelled plan. “If we don’t have the support of politicians, we at least have the support of private individuals and companies.”

READ ALSO: Austrian study shows discrimination against foreigners in the housing market

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