HIBRIA 2024

At the competition exhibition held by the 1st Triestingtaler Stamp Collectors Association from April 19 to 21 at the Cultural Centre Hirtenberg, featuring international participation in all ranks, alongside the award ceremony for the drawing competition of Hirtenberg Elementary School, two commemorative stamps were presented.

Commemorative stamp "Xenia Hausner – EXILES 1, 2017"

Xenia Hausner, born in Vienna in 1951, comes from an artistic family. She studied stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and in London, creating stage sets for theater and opera productions, including the Salzburg Festival and the London Covent Garden Opera House. Since 1992, she has primarily focused on painting. She lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. Women, complex and contradictory, are a central and multifaceted theme in Xenia Hausner's work. Hausner's large-scale works depict intricately composed scenes in intense colours, which she photographs in the studio and then paints. The work "Exiles 1" from 2017, oil on paper on Dibond, is the first motif of a four-part series. It shows young people crowded together, looking out of the window of a train. Arms are stretched out, a child is lifted up to the window. Whether it is a departure or an arrival is unknown – Hausner's paintings are ambivalent and ambiguous. The painting refers to the images of fleeing people that have shaped Europe since 2015, yet the appearance of the people in the picture does not correspond to the common notion of refugees – we ourselves could be these people, for it is often unclear to us where the journey is going.

Commemorative stamp "Jakob L. Moreno“ 1889-1974"

The Austrian-American physician, psychiatrist, and sociologist was the founder of psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy. This year marks the 50th anniversary of his death.

Jacob Levy Moreno was born in Bucharest in 1889. His family soon moved to Vienna, where he later completed his medical studies. From 1919 to 1925, he served as a municipal doctor and company doctor at a thread factory in Bad Vöslau. In 1925, he emigrated to the United States, and from 1936 he directed a psychiatric sanatorium in the state of New York, where he also further developed his methods. He died in 1974 in New York; his honorary grave at the Vienna Central Cemetery bears the inscription "The man who brought joy and laughter to psychiatry." Moreno developed psychodrama from improvisational theater as a counterproposal to Freud's psychoanalysis as a group psychotherapeutic approach. Through psychodramatic performances and enactments, new social roles and their action strategies are actively worked out to provide support in coping with everyday life. Psychodrama can be applied to many medical conditions. Moreno coined the term "group psychotherapy" and established psychodrama as a specialty. His experiences as a doctor in the Mitterndorf refugee camp laid the foundation for sociometry, a method of empirical social research that captures and analyzes the relationships among the members of a group in a sociomatrix.

When? 
19 April 2024 to 21 April 2024
Presentation on 19 April 2024 at 10:00 a.m.

Where? 
Cultural Centre Hirtenberg, Bahngasse 1, 2552 Hirtenberg

Picture of presentation: © Österreichische Post AG

Group picture, left to right: 
Richard Winkler (President, 1st Triestingtaler Stamp Collectors Association Hirtenberg) Günther Stellwag (President, Philately Association Vindobona), Helmut Kogler (President, VÖPh), Patricia Liebermann, (Head of Philately at Austrian Post), Manfred Stelzig (initiator of the "Moreno" commemorative stamp), Karl Brandtner (mayor of the municipality of Hirtenberg)