ROAD*REGISTERS. Records of mobile lifeworlds

Thur, 29.09.2016, 7:00 p.m.
Words of welcome: Eva Blimlinger, Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Introduction: Michael Strassnig, WWTF
Michael Hieslmair and Michael Zinganel, curators

Pan-European transport corridors is the name for the routes between former Eastern and Western Europe whose extension has been made a core project of the European Union’s infrastructure planning. These corridors are monuments to the modernization of states and federations of states, extraordinary technological achievements, and financial investments that have been planned, built, and extended under political and economic pressure (and sometimes against ecological arguments and accompanied by conflicts). Correspondingly, they are subject to strict control (or will for control). Yet, they have always also been arsenals of imagination with a large number of dreams (and nightmares) of both individuals and institutions attached: from economic growth and understanding among nations to the deployment of troops by governmental institutions, from the motorized flight from the petty-bourgeois parental household or one’s seemingly alienated everyday life into holidays to work-related migration and the escape from war zones.

These corridors work like magnets (Steward 2014, 552) “attracting” both things and individuals that move or camp along them and whose experiences manifest themselves in the statistics of controlling bodies, mass media news clips, the everyday stories of the people using these routes and their neighbors, in research reports, and artworks.

Of special interest are those places where the flow of traffic comes or is brought to a halt for a variety of reasons: bus terminals, parking lots for international truck traffic, logistics centers, highway rest stops, formal and informal markets, and frontier stations along the routes. These thresholds in the landscape of mobility offer an opportunity to identify the strategies of national and supranational institutions and big companies regarding the control of migration flows as well as the passing subjects’ different routes, motives and mobility biographies. Anthropological non-places (where only objects communicate with each other at best) sometimes turn into intimate anchors in the highly mobile subjects’ multilocal existence. These subjects develop rituals and routines to recover, to initiate contacts at their destinations and in their regions of provenance, and to cultivate fragmented communities in the places they find themselves in at the moment.

This makes for a more dynamic model of multilocal urbanity comprised of archipelagos connected with each other, which are nothing but stops during a tour of both individuals and objects in their vehicles. These archipelagos are not permanent, though, and can be replaced by new nodes, become obsolete, and go to rack and ruin. Informal nodes may be formalized and controlled, new informal nodes may emerge in other places. These nodes are “polyrhythmic” ensembles comprised of static architectures, mobile objects, and crowds of individuals that, depending on the daily, weekly, or seasonally changing rhythms of traffic flows, increase or dwindle to different densities of use. Obviously, human and non-human forms of mobility are inextricably linked here, their dynamic networks and hierarchies suggesting techniques of a manifold cartography.

ROAD*REGISTERS.
PROGRAM

Details

Sat, 01.10.2016, starting at 7:00 p.m., Tracing Spaces: Research Vehicle on Schillerplatz
Long Night of Museums 2016
Mobile Museum of Rock

Fri, 07.10.2016, 5:00 p.m., Stop and Go Project Space, Nordwestbahnhof
Road*Registers on site. Test field: the everyday mobility routine
Exhibition opening, film and barbecue evening, live music: Matthäus Bär

Sat, 08.10.2016, 11:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
Bus excursion to Nickelsdorf focusing on the subjects mobility and migration

Fri, 14.10.2016, 4:00 p.m., Stop and Go Project Space, Nordwestbahnhof
Curator-guided tour of the premises
7:00 p.m., film presentation: Corridor #8

Fri, 21.10.2016, 4:00 p.m., xhibit
Curator-guided tour

Fri, 28.10.2016, 4:00 h, Stop and Go Project Space, Nordwestbahnhof
Curator-guided tour of the premises
7:00 p.m., film presentation: Logbook Serbistan

Fri, 04.11.2016, 4:00 p.m., xhibit
Curator-guided tour

Fri, 11.11.2016, 4:00 h, Stop and Go Projext Space, Nordwestbahnhof
Curator-guided tour of the premises
7:00 p.m., film presentation: The Forgotten Space

For more information, particularly on the events in the Stop and Go Project Space, Nordwestbahnhof, please see www.stopandgo-transition.net/roadregisters .

As of August 26, 2016