Pia Lanzinger

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 often remain 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 presentday 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 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.

A text-based installation reaching from Südtiroler Platz through Annenstraße right up to Esperantoplatz by Pia Lanzinger.

Opening

Friday, 21.06.2013, 5 pm

Opening party

Friday, 21.06.2013, 6.30 pm

Esperantoplatz, in front of the Gasthaus Postl 

Co-operation project between

< rotor > Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst

Institut für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Steiermark

Stadtbaudirektion – Stadtteilmanagement Annenviertel