A women, born in Vienna that lost her steps on the way

Datum2015 - 2016
Kategorie

A public art piece for Into the city.

A site-specific Installation / public space installation realized for the Wiener Festwochen in public art activities. The piece was afterward on view at center for contemporary art in Graz within the exhibition “PERSECUTED, ROBBED, EXPELLED Artistic Works on Repression in Vienna and Graz in the Nazi-Era.”

This personal project was realized in close collaboration with the writer and researcher Jacquelin Goldberg, whose ancestors fleed from the terror. I developed monuments around memories of space and trauma. The flexible installation was devoted to different women persecuted who escaped from Vienna to America, especially to Venezuela, during Nazi rule.

Mutable temporary monuments were set up to address their personal journeys into the unknown. Between the memories cherished, there was a particular focus on lost space and objects of remembrance, highlighting Viennese imagery that vanished through displacement within the recalling process. The work was an ode to those small stories that disappear in between sadness, fear, and new landscapes, attempting to reconstruct some of the city’s silenced identity.

Instead of a monumental approach to history, these interventions had the flexibility of change. The “monuments” consisted of different structures erected over an abandoned pedestal/fountain atMorzinplatz; the other stories were displayed as an installation inside the exhibition space, changing and going outside once a week throughout the exhibition. Every piece was bilingual with the languages of the heroines.