Stadtverführungen in Wien
Concept, curation, coaching and artistic direction: Wrights & Sites
Co-production: Tanzquartier Wien and the Wiener Festwochen
Vienna (June 2007)
For twenty days, sixteen Viennese groups and individuals join walking artists Wrights & Sites to prise open spaces in Vienna, both everyday and enigmatic, for a season of mis-guided walks, subtle street actions and fragile interventions.
Wrights & Sites have worked with a Viennese panel of experts to select and support the city's citizens, both artists and non-artists, in making a range of different events and experiences inspired by the ongoing Mis-Guide project.
Stadtverführungen in Wien takes you to wastelands, to usually guarded private places, on youthful tram rides, on safaris through the suburbs, to Mexico and beyond.
The events take different forms. Some are mis-guided tours and others are audio walks. There are toolkits to collect and use, miniature guidebooks to change your gaze on familiar Vienna, invitations to tail and follow, and a race to elude the city through its escape routes and emergency exits.
Disguised in everyday life, celebrating ordinary resistance and work-a-day wars, creeping beneath the radar and enjoying disruptions in the cake shops, Stadtverführungen in Wien is a strategy for changing the obvious in magical and disdained margins.
These works are briefly opened doorways into temporary strata. The surface is peeled back, a silent surgery, a misplacing of sounds, a whisper in the traffic, a rumour of another city, a search for traces left by human snails to be washed away by the first rain. Find for yourselves a Vienna made of such discarded assumptions and maps that will tomorrow fade to nothing.
Many thanks to the other members of the expert jury: from the spheres of sociology and urban planning (Anette Baldauf), cultural philosophy and anthropology (Herbert Lachmayer), composition and music (Bernhard Lang) and architecture (Bärbel Müller).
In memory of Marie Zimmermann (1955 - 2007).
Full programme of events
