Exhibition TRACING SPACES: STOP & GO. NODES OF TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSITION

Space for Engaged Architecture, as part of the Faculty of Architecture at BUT, will open an exhibition by the Austrian collective Tracing Spaces “Stop and Go. Nodes of Transformation and Transition”. The exhibition will run from 25 November 2022 to 22 January 2023 in the warehouse space of the legendary Prior department store (TESCO, now OC Dornych), which is scheduled for demolition in 2023.

The research project Stop and Go, led by curators and artists Michael Zinganel and Michael Hieslmair, examined post-socialist changes in the nodes of transnational mobility and migration along the pan-European traffic corridors of a triangle described by Vienna, Tallinn and the Bulgarian-Turkish border. The three case studies are presented primarily in the form of large-scale diagrams and abstract maps of the roads, networks and urban archipelagos along the transnational routes the research team travelled in their Ford Transit transporter van. In Prior, there will also be objects exhibited that the curators brought back ‘from the field’ on their research journeys. It also includes semi-documentary video works by other artists in the form of large-scale projections.

The term Pan-European transport corridors refers to the transport connections between former Eastern and Western European countries, the expansion of which is a core project of EU infrastructural planning: Road transport corridors represent monuments to the modernisation of both states and states unions, which are planned, built and expanded under political and economic pressure (including ecological counter-arguments). At the same time, however, they also stand for a great reserve of imagination and imaginaries to which individuals and institutions attach many dreams (and nightmares). These corridors function like magnets, attracting both things and individuals who move along them or accumulate around them. These experiences are registered and reflected in official control body statistics, mass media news clips, stories of the daily lives of road users and residents, research reports and artworks.

Especially at nodes where traffic flow is interrupted — such as bus terminals, ferry ports, park places for international lorry drivers (TIR), motorway service stations, logistics centres, formal and informal markets or border crossing stations along the corridors. The strategies of both the state (and supra-state) institutions and large-scale companies can be discerned, as well as the motives and biographies of the actors passing through them. In the process, a more dynamic model of urbanity emerges from networked archipelagos that sometimes transform from non-places to intimate anchors of their multilocal existence in everyday life.

On Thursday 24 November at 18:00 will be the exhibition opening and curators’ talk. During the duration of the exhibition, there will be a discussion with the Czech authors of the Steel Cities project on the architecture of logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, film screenings and guided tours of the former Prior building with architectural theorist Šárka Svobodová and architect Eva Truncová. The department store, built between 1980 and 1984 based on a project by architects Zdeněk Řihák and Zdeněk Sklepek, was the most modern shopping centre in Moravia at the time. Its demolition is planned for 2023, and in its place a complex of six buildings with offices, shops and rental apartments will be built.

events:

24. 11. 2022 • 18:00 opening + curators’ talk Michael Hieslmair and Michael Zinganel

14. 12. 2022 • 17:00 Prior guided tour

14. 1. 2023 • 15:00 Prior guided tour

21. 1. 2023 • 15:00 Prior guided tour

curatorial team: Michael Hieslmair | Michael Zinganel

The collective Tracing Spaces was founded in 2012 by historians, architects, artists and curators Michael Hieslmair and Michael Zinganel in Vienna. As an independent, interdisciplinary research platform, they conceive and produce projects, exhibitions, publications and other formats on the topics of urban research, mobility, tourism and migration, as well as research-based art and artistic research projects. Since summer 2015they have been running a project space at Viennese Nordwestbahnhof, one of the last inner-city logistics hubs, where a multi-layered multimedia cartography of the migration and mobility experiences of actors working there is being successively created, embedded in the social milieu of the logistics landscape.

https://tracingspaces.net/

production: Karolína Plášková | Viola Rösch | Ruslan Dimov | Daniel Bemberger | Eva Truncová

graphic design: Pavel Holomek

translations: Moudrý překlad

project support: Lucie Zádrapová | Adéla Šoborová

supervision: Jan Kristek

The research project Stop and Go has been headed by Michael Zinganel and Michael Hieslmair—both historians, architects, artists and curators— from Vienna, in cooperation with human geographer Tarmo Pikner from Tallinn and anthropologist and historian Emiliya Karaboeva from Sofia. The project was funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) [Wiener Wissenschaft-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds] and hosted by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

FB Event

Inserted by	Šoborová Adéla
Inserted	16.11.22

Share Tweet

BUT FA

Departments

Exhibition TRACING SPACES: STOP & GO. NODES OF TRANSFORMATION AND TRANSITION