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Selected statues, objects, signs, and letterings on house fronts
and stores along the axis Südtiroler Platz - Annenstraße - Esperantoplatz
are breaking their silence. They are beginning to speak and tell
us of the changes in the city, of their observations and innermost
desires. Thus objects are dawning to awareness that have had their
homes at some places for several hundreds of years but have for
the most part remained unnoticed.
The road axis that links the train station to the city center was
laid out in the mid-nineteenth century and has been a part of Graz
which this city cannot be imagined without and which has already
seen many ups and downs. The street has been intensively discussed
for decades, some have maintained that it is dead; others conceived
development scenarios and scrapped them again. Currently, the axis
undergoes extensive urban restructuring.
The Berlin-based artist Pia Lanzinger took a very close look at
the street, studied its checkered history, and sounded out the present-day
environment. Then she developed an artistic text installation that
consists of about 30 individual elements. The statements are based
on the one hand on conversations with local residents and businesspeople,
with people who have generations of ancestors who lived in this
part of town and others who only recently immigrated here from different
countries, and on the other, on historical and present written sources.
A number of current topics and such ones highlighting the history
of the street come up, among them the development of business, the
transformations in the street space and the manifold ways it is
put to use, the representation of women in the cityscape, the color
black, colonial subjects in the urban space, maintaining traditions,
the courage to embrace change as well as the wish to be different
from the mainstream.
Altogether, this results in a multi-layered collage of the Annenviertel
today. The passers-by are invited to read individual text fields
when they pass them or to explore the entire sequence in the frame
of a walk from Südtiroler Platz to Esperantoplatz, and let themselves
be inspired to examine the social fabric of this part of Graz in
a differentiated manner.
Installed till 3rd of November 2013.
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A cooperative project by:
< rotor > center for contemporary art
Institute for Art in Public Space Styria
City of Graz - Building Authority - Community Work Annenviertel
Thanks for the support:
All participants businesspeople and the houseowners!
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