080110 EX Art in Vienna: Monuments/Documents - Sites of memory - Spaces of Negotiation (2023S)

Our approach will focus on monuments and "places" in the conventional, topographical sense, "counter-monuments" (James E. Young), critical/temporal/ephemeral interventions - but also entire ensembles of spaces, squares and "sites of memory" (Pierre Nora) in Vienna.
We will deal with monuments that were explicitly erected as such - but also with objects/spatial assemblages that have only acquired the status of a monument and/or 'place of memory' over time. A particularly important aspect of our 'walks' will be the network of relationships between monument/sign/trace on the one hand and forms and practices of "memory" / "forgetting" on the other.
The aim of the excursion is to work out not only the primary appeal character but also the "performance" (but also the failure, the silencing) of the monuments - their ideological conditionality and/or subversive potential. We will always try to find answers to the question to what extent, in how many different ways a place, a monument can "be political" (beyond the vulgar understanding such as politics of the day or party politics) - and to what extent the place/monument communicates with the public space. Following on directly from this: what are we actually talking about when we speak of "public space"? And in general: what makes a monument visible? And what, if anything, is veiled, affirmed? How is a (historical, political...) "latency" transposed into a regime of visibility? To what extent can a monument be read as a litmus paper of certain (social, political, historical...) phenomena? To whom do monuments speak (if at all)? Why does a monument/memorial stand in its place (in exactly that place)? What forms, levels of reference to place can a monument/intervention work with? To what extent can a place/monument be understood as an entanglement/projection surface of often multiple, conflictual, irreconcilable meanings - and offer several readings?

Closely interwoven with this, we will examine the relationship (or non-relation) of the memorial objects to a concrete place/spatial structure and the concepts of 'public sphere/public space' and 'collective memory'. Various traces/symptoms of the political (which possibly only become manifest through the monument as an 'indicator') - but also concrete practices of critical, playful or emancipatory subversion in public space - will be examined. The objects are questioned in terms of their claim to validity and examined under the aspect of how they are integrated into certain ideologies and how they "admonish" the public (individual layers of the public) to which they speak to remember. Who actually determines the "function" of a monument - who is addressed - and when does a monument fail?

Another, more general goal is the common focus on the multiple, often hardly tangible contradictions and interactions, contextual shifts (phenomena of adaptations, amalgamations, appropriations, palimpsestations) that are intertwined in a monument - or whose traces are inscribed in a place.