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Developed in collaboration by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna/
Institute for Fine Arts and the Vienna Public Libraries,
BücherWand VII-X comprises four different art projects
thematising reference fields between literature and the visual
arts with different means.
Both literature and history, if they are to be carried
outside, have to be performed in public or staged as sites
of memory.
This is what Anna Witt tries to achieve in her project Viva
la Gemeindebau where she links the history of the Gemeindebauten and the resistance of the social democratic working class
against the antidemocratic Heimwehren [Austrian Home Guards]
and the Austrian army of 1934 to today’s workaday life
in a music video based on the song Die „Arbeiter von
Wien” [We are the workers of Vienna … we are
the building people of the world to come]. Johanna Aigner’s
radio play DIN 1505 represents a variation of re-enactment.
It features a conversation about her life, traveling and
the human race as such. Although the radio play relies in
particular on the acoustically engineered space, the facades
of the Vienna City Libraries are designed as special settings.
The public libraries have been an essential tool of national
education and an important element of the emancipation of
the working class. They are supposed to not only mediate
the literary “high culture” but also foster the
abilities of the socially or otherwise disadvantaged. Organizing
a workshop primarily for children with dyslexia where a story
to a self-designed cartoon has to be developed, Nathalie
Koger refers to this in a special way in her project Trieg
17.
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Moreover, another ostensibly historical reflection enters
here which refers to the way how all aspects of life were
organized by the political parties and the churches in the
early twentieth century; for the artist conceives the entire
workshop as a stage where beside the home-made props for
the animation film the participating children themselves
turn into protagonists. The results will be summed up in
a video work titled “Movin’ Subjects” and
presented by the artist at the end of the project.
The project Signo by Elvedin Klacar and Cornelia Silli,
where Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian and German writings on a sign
post tell us about distances in space and time, rounds up
BücherWand VII-X in an ironical manner. It does not
only refer to the migration history of the participating
artists but also to the imaginary space of encounter between
language(s) and culture(s) in a (public) library
In this way libraries are to turn into spaces of communication,
intervention and presentation again, thus into public space
in the classic sense of the word.
bk
transl. ol detailed information, printable graphical material, dates
and contact:
www.buecherwand.at
www.buechereien.wien.at
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