Speaking / Public / Art

Public Art is one of many conflicting elements in urban space. Who designs and constructs objects and situations in the city and whom do they address? The students chose specific places in Vienna to discuss their presence and potential and to develop ideas for interventions or simply to think of ways of documenting complex urban situations.

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The Focus Week started with a meeting in my studio in Favoriten to talk and get to know each other. I shared my own experiences and work strategies in public space – commissions, competitions, self-organization, models, and visualizations, realized and unrealized efforts, logistics, bureaucracy etc.

In the following the students proposed sites and situations in the city to discuss – specific elements in public space, artworks/artistic intervention, or things that resemble an artwork: Things that communicate certain ideas to the passers-by, markers of urban and societal change.

On field trips we visited and discussed the temporary “Station Intervention” by artists Steffi Alte, Simone Bader, Bartholomäus Kinner and Samuel Seger as well as the new logo of the city of Vienna as a sculptural object, both located on Schwarzenbergplatz as well as the construction site of Wien Museum Karlsplatz, the Albertina entrance and its roof object by Hans Hollein, the inaccessible lawn circle in the middle of Schottentor station, and Krüger/Pardeller’s artistic project in the adjacent underground garage.

Later we looked at the large-scale construction project on a long abandoned plot between Wienfluss and Schönbrunner Schlossstraße within the context of Meidling’s urban development, contextualized by a walk along Meidlinger Hauptstraße with its unique almost half-rural character that might change significantly in the future.

Over the course of the workshop, students worked further with such objects/situations, discussed their presence and potential. We talked about their agenda, their temporality, about ways of documenting / preserving their memory as well as about ways of further addressing their specifics through interventions in situ or documentary means (image/sound/text, etc.).

Several of the students’ investigations resulted in projects for Angewandte Festival.

Dates:

16/23/25 March 2021

20 April 2021

4 May 2021

Coordinated by:

Andreas Fogarasi

Time

Summer Semester 2021