reverse imagining vienna

Anthropogenic Mass and Its Speculative Futures

02-29 May 2024
AIL - Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab
Otto Wagner-Postsparkasse
Georg-Coch-Platz 2
1010 Vienna

This exhibition is part of Klima Biennale 2024

Since 2020, the global stock of man-made mass has exceeded the total sum of biomass on Earth – around 90 percent of which is building materials. In the project Reverse Imagining Vienna, two sculptors and nine writers took a Viennese Gründerzeit building and the Prater Bridge, which crosses over the Danube, as material and speculative anchors in which to gain perspectives on sustainable relationships with inanimate matter. Referring to so-called reverse engineering, the two structures were deconstructed and recomposed in a historical, material-analytical, poetic and visionary way using reverse imagining.

Over a two year period, the project brought together national and international experts from the disciplines of geology, physics, ecology, urban morphology, transport sciences, evolutionary biology, literature and sculpture. The nine anthropogenic materials most relevant to the case studies were identified and analyzed in terms of cultural history, environmental science and social metabolism, from extraction to recycling management and emissions. Samples of material allowed conclusions to be drawn about their respective origins; the geological formation and potential futures were discussed in lectures by the participating scientists and contextualized for further speculative processing. In this way, images of varied futures were created with a time horizon that extends from the present and spans into the geological distance.

The exhibition Reverse Imagining Vienna is the final presentation of the artistic research project of the same name. Sculptures, scientific analyses of the nine anthropogenic materials and the first volume of a publication containing the resulting literary contributions are on display. Four readings by the participating authors will take place as part of the exhibition.

Writers: Ann Cotten, Elias Hirschl, Jakob Pretterhofer, Julia Grillmayr, Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Neslihan Yakut, Nika Pfeifer, Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala

Scientists: Angelika Psenner, Barbara Laa, Filipa L. Sousa, Fridolin Krausmann, Jan Zalasiewicz, Johannes Weber, Josepha Edbauer, Michael Wagreich, Peter Fichtinger, Sebastian Hafner, Tanja Traxler, Tess Posch

Project management and sculpure: Christoph Weber, Nikolaus Eckhard