Michael Schuster, Brigitte Kossek, David Auner

Steiermark x 25 documents the twenty-five most frequently used colloquial languages in Styria with nine signs installed at selected state borders. As a concise counter-image to the exclusion policy of refusing bilingual place-name signs, the artistic intervention takes on the function of a symbolic sign for cultural, social and political integration.

As an art project, Steiermark x 25 is one of the relevant strategies in current discourse that interpret the object installed in public space as a medium of artistic statements in political and social realms.

The artists make use of the systems and structures that shape public space by logging into the existing, familiar vocabulary of signs and forms and crossing the "threshold of difference" to everyday perception through additions and changes. The "disruptive factor" of conventional aestheticisation functions as a trigger for irritations and discussions in real space by shifting the context.