Bachelor Studio VI 2019
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Master / Pieces __
Appropriated Monuments

Geography, Landscape and City
Alessandra Cianchetta, Daniela Herold

Team
Diana Cuc, Leonie Link

Appropriated Monuments is a museum that is added as network of six permanent installations onto the existing city fabric of Vienna. Referring to the ideas of the Situationist International, the exhibited art is understood as a visualization of historical and cultural processes, which transfer aesthetic concepts to the society. In this context the notion of art and/or a masterpiece is not defined as an object, but as a geographical space or situation to be experienced. Art therefore is neither transportable nor purchasable. In addition to that we define the city as our collection. A collection of situations within the city, which can be exposed through the intervention of a museum and vis versa extends from these situations. Based on this, the museum is a tool to critique certain situations within the city, reworking problematic traces, becoming an installation itself. These interventions extend from the certain urban situation they are placed in and stick, like sculptural prosthesis to existing structures in the city. Each intervention visualizes a crucial point of its urban situation and makes them through that accessible. The site of this interventions is in the centre of Vienna, located in and around the Museumsquartier. All this spots are monument(al) spaces which have a strong historical and actual importance for the (urban) development of Vienna. Their monumentality is created by their position in space through certain axis, symmetries, frames and views. Our interventions critique the monumentality of the space. The outer form and accessibility of the interventions play with and destroy the axis, symmetries and frames of the space. While working with the city, the interventions create a different kind of public space, which should be public domain and approachable at any time. Through entering the interventions the spectator becomes a performative part of these installations (vitrine) itself. Museum and spectator are therefore both: observer of urban situations, being observed in urban situations, becoming an urban situation themselves. The interventions are meant to be permanent but can, as the city itself, be over-layered and at any moment disappear.