Wrights & Sites - Stadtverführungen in Wien

Vienna (Austria), 2007.

Concept, curation, coaching and artistic direction by Wrights & Sites. Co-production by Tanzquartier Wien and Wiener Festwochen for the Vienna Festival 2007.

Wrights & Sites worked with 16 Viennese groups and individuals, both artists and non-artists, to prise open spaces in Vienna and bring a season of 145 mis-guided walks, actions and interventions to the city over a three-week period.

Stadtverführungen in Wien briefly opened doorways into temporary strata, taking you to wastelands, to usually guarded private places, on youthful tram rides, on safaris through the suburbs, to Mexico and beyond. Tours and audio walks. Toolkits to enable subtle street actions. Fragile disruptions. 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 offered audiences tactics for changing the obvious in magical and disdained margins.

The 16 pieces of work developed for the programme were:

•5-Minute Revolutions by Nathalie Koger and Miriam Raggam;

•Ways Out of Vienna by Karin Eva Swoboda;

•Detourism. A-1210 Leopoldau by Luciano Parodi;

•The City Belongs to You! by Johann Schneider;

•The Zone by Karl Bruckschwaiger;

•First Listen Up - Decolonising Vienna Tour by Pamoja/Research Group on Black Austrian History and Present (co-ordinated by Araba Evelyn Johnston-Arthur);

•Follow me, Hold this by Cabula6;

•Guided by Accident by Oliver Hangl (featuring Maschek);

•Hüttenzauber by Eva Grumeth, Stephanie Rauch and Lena Winkler-Hermaden;

•Lean Against the City by Verein Freiraumexperimente, with Florian Brand and Manfred Schwaba, and Fritz/Frassl (Juli Fritz and Elisabeth Frassl);

•Lehmann’s Addresses by Georg Blaschke;

•Last Places by Tobias Dörr;

•mood.routes by art.tickles, with Sergius Nolle, Claudia Nussbaumer, Suna Orcun and Özlem Sümerol;

•Real Crime Walk by Michael Zinganel;

•Soundwalk: through Mexico to Venice in Vienna by Robert Schwarz;

•Suburb Safari, or: Who Can Find the Mountain Goat? by KagranKollektiv (Patrick Golkowsky, Helmut Preis and Stefanie Sandhäugl).

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).

Images: Stephen Hodge, Luciano Parodi, Georges Schneider, art.tickles, Tanzquartier Wien, Wiener Festwochen.