Some activists carry banners to push for change. Others, like Luxembourger Lucie Wahl, of satirical art collective Richtung 22, carry video cameras.

Today a political sciences student in Vienna, the young film maker joined Richtung 22 at the age of 16 after watching one of their films “Ons Education” (Our Education—about the Luxembourg education system reform). She quickly saw the potential for transformative change through satire. “I realised that it was something that was missing in Luxembourg, a voice that’s not like the other voices,” she told me. “We don’t do these things to talk to Bettel [the Luxembourg prime minister] afterwards. We really just give little inputs.”

Richtung 22 was founded in 2012 by students as a satirical theatre group from the Théâtre National de Luxembourg. It quickly expanded to include film, press releases, guerilla actions and, most recently, monuments. Today the collective counts around 50 members, who contribute ideas and skills when they want to. Wahl explains that because most members are studying or working abroad, the groups tend to meet on Skype to flesh out projects. “If I’m in Luxembourg, and I’ve a camera and time and ask members to do something, we just do it,” she says. “It’s also a different process if you’re making a theatre play or longer film.”

Photo: Richtung 22

Among the headline-grabbing projects Richtung 22 has worked on are a monument of Claude Marx, the director of Luxembourg’s financial supervisory body the CSSF, who was implicated in the Panama Papers offshore tax disclosures. Richtung 22 erected a wooden sculpture in his image in Kirchberg (pictured above) to coincide with the one hundredth anniversary celebrations of German socialist revolutionary Karl Marx. The monument wasn’t welcomed--“They took DNA traces,” Wahl explains.

Police shooting

They were also on the receiving end of angry abuse from police on social media after Richtung 22 put up a plaque in Bonnevoie (pictured below) to mark the place where a police officer shot a man on 11 April 2018. “They weren’t asking questions like ‘how can this happen?’ It was really aggressive to us but I guess it’s normal,” Wahl says.

The collective received its biggest response, however, in June 2015 when on the eve of national day, members wrote a new, satirical version of the national anthem in chalk on the ground in front of the Philharmonie. One of the activists was dragged through court, and fined €200, which they successfully overturned on appeal. “After that, we attracted different people. Before we had artists then there were more law students.” It was a shift that Wahl says has definitely helped empower the group.

Photo: Richtung 22

And it’s not only other people they like to poke fun at. Like any good satirical collective, there are no limits to their reach, even the collective itself. On the last Friday of every month members broadcast on Radio ARA a self-parodying radio play about Richtung 22. “The concept is we’re trying to start a revolution, but we fail every time,” Wahl smiles.

The public response in Luxembourg hasn’t all been negative. The group receives some finance from the national youth service among other bodies, not to mention public donations. Most importantly, Wahl says her family, who raised her to be politically active, fully supports her creative efforts with Richtung 22.