Fragments as casts for a dystopic city

In dialogue with Francesco Careri’s concept of Urban Drift, Alessandro Albrecht, Ines Kaufmann, Luiza Furtado and Nikola Milojcevic create a virtual abstraction of Vienna’s city map through accidental cartography. The collaborative project thus brings together five medially and philosophically different perspectives on urban experiences, in particular the aesthetic and environmental effects of mass consumption, gentrification and ecological waste.

The act of walking, as an aesthetic tool of knowledge and a physical activation of overseen space, permits us to create urban inventories. The exhibition translates aspects of human interaction with urban timing and infrastructural fragments into a collective framework for the five artists’ range of transmedial artworks. Everyday materials of the city, remnants of discomfort and structural dynamics, are transformed into allegories of civic presence, negotiating imaginative spaces. Street signs, bent beyond recognition but not robbed of their recognition value, are direct witnesses to the regulation of Viennese traffic. Scrap metal, paper and plastic, the city’s troublesome waste, find new life.

The artists’ collective thoughts thus evolve into a testimony of microhistory, enacting the metamorphic passage between the means of production and the thing produced. Finely drawn lines on canvases embody observations of the permeability of the human figure. Fabrics unite to form organic figures. Gaze and movement develop into cartographer’s tools, tensioning the intertwined relations between debris, corporeality, and dimensional gaps.

The artists almost archaeologically condense the overall experience of urbanity into the presented collection of works. “Fragments as casts for a dystopic city” invites you to drift through the virtual city activated within BcmA by Albrecht, Kaufmann, Furtado and Milojcevic.

(Teresa Kamencek, 2023)