Emerging Environments

Opening: January 24th 2024, 4 p.m.; Exhibition until Autumn 2024 University of Arts Linz, Hauptplatz 6, 2. OG, 4020 Linz

Students conduct research at three different locations: around Lake Traunsee (Bachelor), Venice and Rome (master). Parts of the projects created during the 2023/24 academic year will be shown in a constantly expanding and changing exhibition in the Rectorate corridor.

How can we decolonize our mindset from violence and oppression, from illegitimate privileges, from the quiescent social and environmental acceptance of injustice? Art and architecture today has to question the present, explore its creative margins, inhabit its conflicts, taking care of the rejected, welcoming the possible, assembling the future. Art today needs to forge new politics, new ecologies, new relationships with science and society responding to emerging social and environmental questions, create the forms and the languages we need for a better comprehension of the shift we’re living in. We need to bring art back to a need, share it with those who need it and transform it into something needed. It is about the fine art of reinhabiting the planet.<o:p></o:p>

Emerging Environments seeks spaces of utopia - uses and coexistences that assemble in space like an expansion or reflection in relation to existing spaces and forms of organization, installing new perspectives and opening up to the new. Untested uses and images encounter rebellious natures, wild forests, new land distributions, appropriated voids, and re-organized structures.

Unit Traunsee / Bachelor
The Traunsee lake is the location of the investigations for bachelor students. The landscapes around the lake seem idyllic, but are affected by overtourism in summer, lack of use in winter, vacancy and migration. The shoreline must be protected, if only for the sake of biodiversity; in reality, the lakes in the region are brimming with endless private signs. And while entire houses stand empty in the town centers, new sealing projects are planned on the outskirts. In the 19th century, this formerly industrial area (salt) became the prototypical summer resort, where people spent weeks recovering from the city and enjoying nature, a correlation of the urban and rural fabric that spanned several seasons. Today, tourists stay only briefly, take a lake tour, buy a piece of Gmundner ceramics as a souvenir and are gone again. The history of oppression and resistance (Willy Fred resistance movement) and the fact that a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp was operated in Ebensee remain rather hidden underground. Student’s projects now take a critical look at these topics. The Traunsee unit is connected to PLATEAU BLO_Raum am See, a project of the Capital of Culture 2024 Salzkammergut.

Unit Venice / Master
The Unit is conceived as an emerging learning environment rooted in Venice and its Lagoon. We consider this context as a complex technosphere characterised by the otherness-uniqueness of a transitional ecosystem articulated in a micro topography of an intertidal terrain, an historic trading power and economic center as well as the capital of a colonial domain, a decaying port for the chemical industry, a venue for international cultural events such as the Venice Biennale and a major site of global tourism. The material narratives of Venice and its lagoon will be considered as both site of actions and knowledge. The Unit will practice forms of collective living in transitional spaces as a way to experiment life in common and exploring Venice with its lagoon as a method to enable a transformative experience of mutual learning and sharing in between the temporary community of researchers (us) and the surrounding contexts (human/non human). The broader research is intended to explore the potential of radical empathy as pedagogical experimental approach to open up the possibility to re-think artistic production and design strategies, in order to relate to different contexts and the otherness with renewed attitude of care, understanding and collective imagination.<o:p></o:p>

Unit Roma / Master
The given hypothesis is that Rome is a complex form of life, a sympoietic eco-myth-system, with its own emerging organization capable of spontaneously evolving and self-regenerating over time. Thus Rome has always confronted and included: wild nature, its alter ego Latium; foreigners, cyclically summoned to regenerate the city; and time itself, conceived as circular. The course will investigate this hypothesis by weaving the practice of Stalker who in 30 years has created a continuous cosmogonic action aimed at exploring/narrating/imagining the reality of Rome. The center of the investigation proposed to the students are those edges of the city, irreducible to clear boundaries, territories of confrontation with otherness, unplanned or regulated spaces in which the spontaneous confrontation between the ruins of the past and the forms of life that find refuge there generates highly diverse, insurgent, "possible adjacent" bio and socio ecosystems in which a new principle of reality can be regenerated within the folds of a reality now in exhaustion. The Rome hypothesis is therefore a construction site open to the verification of emerging bio-social processes, to the complex study of their natural and urban history. An open construction site to verify if and how the  hypothesis Rome can constitute a socio-ecological perspective of escape from the irresponsible, reductive and violent human attempt to dominate others and destroy life on the planet.