Barbara Steiner, director of the Kunsthaus Graz, will discuss with Michael Zinganel and Michael Hieslmair, who have been running a project space at the Nordwestbahnhof – Vienna’s last inner-city logistics hub – since 2015.

Embedded in the social milieu of logistics, they are successively creating a multi-layered multimedia cartography of the flows of goods and the migration and mobility experiences of people working here – with the aim to bring the history of this place into the public consciousness before it will disappear forever. Since 2020 the project space has been rebranded as an art project under the title “Museum Nordwestbahnhof”. At present, the KÖR Vienna project “Auf und Zugeschüttet” (Built-up and backfilled) can be seen here.

In their research-based art projects, both explore modern logistics landscapes and transnational road transport corridors as places of everyday encounters and histories. The interim results of their research are brought back to these nodes through on-site artistic interventions. At bus stations, motorway service stations or distribution centres, the established concepts of public sphere and public space are called into question: here highly mobile subjects develop pragmatic tactics, begin to appropriate spaces for dwellings in transit, create fragmented communities for trade or the exchange of experiences, or simply to share – and solve – problems. Here, communities are temporarily re-formed and dissolved again. However, these nodes are by no means isolated (non-)places; they exist in a network that extends over endless rail and road connections. The transformation of these networked spaces gives rise to alternative models of (post-)urbanism, which – driven by poly-rhythmic condensations of coming and going and the continuous performance of difference – increasingly shapes our everyday life.