Feb 11–Feb 22, 2021

Mapping the City’s Land

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Museumsplatz 1, 01070 Wien Map
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Research into property ownership in the Spittelau/Althangrund area dug deeply and yielded some complex results. Students at the Institute of Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna present a complex piece of urban space in the form of a multimedia map in 35 fragments.

When the railway tracks were built over, the Spittelau/Althangrund area gained a great deal of urban land. No longer parcelled with the natural city ground, today it forms a complex structure with horizontal stratification — in spatial and legal terms, and also in terms of everyday accessibility and use.

Following the restriction of possibilities to survey the site itself imposed in early 2020, the area described became increasingly imaginary. On a speculative level, the dry land register map was overlaid with poetic urban images from Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. The dislocated place was digitally reconstructed, imagined, distorted and re-narrated. Memories collide with images from the Internet, historical maps elicit fictional narratives. The result is a multi-layered portrait of an inaccessible and enigmatic terrain: Mapping Althangrund — an approach from a distance.