[2017] The Third City (Red Vienna)

Photo-series in 52 parts
Details from visual essay

"[...] Red Vienna—a 'virtual city'. A 'second Vienna', which can only be reconstructed in memory, is imprinted against the back light of what Kraus called 'the observatory of the end of mankind'. The galaxy of the Höfe forms a 'virtual city', bound to remain such, its intention to set itself up as other than the real one, and—at the same time—at making the real one strange. [...]" (Manfredo Tafuri)

Departing from Manfredo Tafuri's seminal essay Politics and Housing in Socialist Vienna 1919-1933, the project traces both the text’s theoretical framework, as well as its related locations in Vienna. Combining alleged historic photographs of the current buildings with theoretical, lyrical, and political writings from the time, the tableaux unfold a network of relationships that reveal Vienna's communal apartment blocks as both symbol and social democratic strategy: A portrait of a 'Thirdspace', where—as the human geographer Edward Soja says—all social, historical, imagined, and experienced spatiality comes together.