We Hope this Does Not Make Us Sad

Using the example of the Canadian city Vancouver Urban Subjects developed a spatial intervention for the project space halfway, that builds a discourse on the question of ownership in relation to urban space. In the research project, Vancouver serves as membrane for the attempt to visualize the complex and near invisible relations between a globalized economy and the spaces of everyday life. Vancouver serves as a backdrop to question an economy of image-production in which the impact of private investment capital has hardly ever been so thoroughly translated spatially into the urban texture. Yet on the other hand this relationship remains uncannily invisible and difficult to grasp. The production of an urban image via the skyline forms the surface for an urban model, where the radical redefinition of boundaries of the urban archipelago is strongly felt and made tangible by real estate values and prices. This project by Urban Subjects addresses the politics of representation in a city which renders itself visible only for privileged subjects: The Plutocratic dividual.

halfway is a place for the spatialization of acute urban phenomena; a space in which methods of artistic research realize a practice of urban curating and social relationships are translated into design. halfway is the laboratory of the research project Curating The Urban. On Spatializing Urban Conditions by Christina Nägele, Heidi Pretterhofer and Christian Teckert with Linda Lackner. It is funded by the Program for Arts-based Research (PEEK AR00405) of the Austrian Science Fund FWF and is located at the Institute of Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Urban Subjects is a cultural research collective formed in 2004 by Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, and Helmut Weber and based in Vancouver, Canada and Vienna, Austria.
Together they develop artistic-poetic projects focusing on global-urban issues, the texture of cities, and on civic imaginations. They have held residencies at VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver), at the Leuphana Arts Program (Lüneburg), and at the Austrian Pavilion at the EXPO in Milano. Their publications include Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade , Momentarily: Learning from Mega-events (with Bik Van der Pol and Alissa Firth-Eagland), The Militant Image Reader (Edition Camera Austria, Graz), and, as guest editors, Camera Austria (issue 139) on Sincerity . They participated in the exhibition Urgent Imagination (Western Front, Vancouver) and have also curated exhibitions internationally, such as Not Sheep: New Urban Enclosures and Commons (Artspeak, Vancouver), The Militant Image – Picturing What Is Already Going On, or The Poetics of the Militant Image (Camera Austria, Graz) and they facilitated the exhibition and public programming for The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21 ^st century at the Museum of Vancouver.