Action Day - Program Schillerplatz

For the Action Day on October 19, 2022, as part of Climate Action Month in October, the Academy turns to the outside world to further deepen the internal learning and design process on sustainability issues and invite the public to participate. Reflections on sustainable action, civil disobedience and alternative forms of appropriation of public spaces are negotiated with various art actions such as the collective chalk drawing as well as lectures, discussions and workshops, mobile solar kitchen and many more.

With guests such as the political scientist Alexander Behr, the community and regional developer Nina Svanda as well as members of the Artists and Museums for Future movement and the Climate University (CZ), we will examine and discuss global consequences of climate change, migration movements and mobilization strategies from various disciplines at three locations around the Academy at Schillerplatz. Curators Fanny Hauser and Mirela Baciak expound on the topic of sustainable exhibition making, the students union (ÖH) of the Academy and students of the Academy of Fine Arts and Design Bratislava invite to workshops in the garden of the Secession, while in front of the Academic building a collectively designed chalk painting by the studios of Drawing and Graphic Arts/Printing Techniques visually and participatively addresses the city.

Conceived by Academy | Art | Public Sphere and with the participation of various institutes with its as students, graduates, artists, architects and scientists of the Academy, an extensive program was put together:

10 h – 18 h, Schillerplatz
The Bigger Picture
Students of the Institute of Fine Arts will sketch the Schillerplatz in a collective and collaborative drawing process. The Bigger Picture is a concrete attempt at a joint design, which unites the students' reflections, ideas, images, plans, games and drafts and allows a common image to emerge. How do you edit and change an overall picture of which you are an essential part? This action is a reflection and artistic action about our future - a collective future, where extraordinary turnarounds will be necessary, and this future begins now.

10 h – 18 h Exhibit Studio
What's another word for holding together?
A group exhibition in three chapters
Chapter 1: Samira Engel, Hicran Ergen, Anna Rimmel
An exhibition built upon traces. It reflects on the necessity for "support structures" and is looking back to the past year's exhibitions at Exhibit Studio and the topics that were unfolding within them. The crises evolving or becoming visible through the pandemic were already enough reason for thinking about the uncertainties surrounding us and the futures to come. Now, several months and crises later, the urgency to think about what could help or what could become a support structure in the chaos around us, pushed us to think about possible exhibition formats that could react to the reality we live in.

10 h – 14 h, Academy Courtyard
Care & Repair
Faculty and students of the Institute for Art and Architecture will take-action on the care of things in their everyday environment. Storage boxes, tables, chairs and stools will be reinvented, repaired, repurposed from old and new materials. The upcycling production-line will unfold visibly in the courtyard. The courtyard will be temporarily accessible for the public through the entrance on Markartgasse. 

12:30 h Schillerplatz
The Pop up Solarlabor Vienna cooks with the sun in public space. A cargo bike with different solar stoves and solar ovens opens a culinary experimental performative space, where solar cooking is shown and tasted. Exciting conversations about the origin of food (made in, packaged in, transported by... organic, fair, seasonal, regional...) and new solar cooking recipes for a growing solar community in Vienna emerge. Cooperation partners are Blubbergarten as well as Robinfoods and the community agriculture project of the LaaerBergBauerInnen. The Maderna Tractor also comes from Vienna and was funded by the Mobility Fund Vienna for the Sonnwendviertel East.
www.tozomia.net/solar-manufaktur/
RobinFoods will also distribute food rescued from their own cargo bikes, present their own projects and be there for exchange and networking.
www.robin-foods.org/

13 h – 15 h Schillerplatz
Mobile bicycle workshop
On Schillerplatz, Marianne "BIKEPUNKpfanne" Eberl, fine arts graduate, will provide help and guidance on how to check out and repair bikes yourself.

13 h – 17 h Schillerplatz
The climate time machine
The dismountable cabin of the time machine is insulated and heated to specific temperatures that we should expect in the future. Using a sensor and a Raspberry Pi, the temperature in the cabin is linked to the year in which these maximum temperatures can be expected, based on a table created by Scientists For Future. This year is displayed on a monitor on the outside of the retro-futuristic time machine. In addition, there are VR goggles in the cabin with which you can also visually find yourself in a possible future. The time machine is meant to make it possible to experience with one's own body and with all one's senses what is in store for us if we – but especially the political and economic decision-makers – are not finally prepared to act. Tom Poe for Artists For Future Austria in cooperation with Scientists For Future, Fridays For Future, Teachers For Future and other climate alliances. The VR environment was provided by Our Earths Project.

14 h  Schillerplatz
Official opening
Speech by the Rectorate (Johan F. Hartle, Ingeborg Erhart and Werner Skvara) on Climate Action October and the role of sustainability policy at the Academy.

14:15 h  Schillerplatz
Academy | Art | Public: Project presentations
Short presentation of the projects funded by the department Academy | Art | Public for 2022. Tomash Schoiswohl announces his project Geile Knoten, which will artistically and discursively address traffic nodes in Vienna on October 22, and Mariama Sow reports on her Black City Walk (re)claming our bodies in the city, which already took place in July and Johannes Wiener presents his project "Carried by the cherry trees".. Moderation: Johan F. Hartle, Rector

14:30 h Schillerplatz
Panel Discussion Mob.Mobility
The term mob is used disparagingly to describe forms of life and behavior that transgress the ordered fabric of social space. On the one hand, some of these forms of transgression are part of basic principles of democratic practice (the taking possession of public spaces). On the other hand, some forms of ordered mobility (car traffic, air traffic, cruise ship traffic) are of extreme destructiveness. This destructiveness unleashes its own mobility-among other things, in the form of migratory movements that are inevitable with an increasingly catastrophic climate situation. Political scientist Alexander Behr (University of Vienna) will speak with municipal and regional development expert Nina Svanda (Vienna University of Technology) and architect Lisa Schmidt-Colinet (Institute for Art and Architecture, Academy) on the topics of climate migration, the limits and possibilities of an energy transition, and the appropriation of public space. Moderation: Jens Kastner, Social Scientist, IKW

Alexander Behr is a political scientist and journalist. In addition to teaching at universities, schools and trade unions, he is engaged in transnational social movements. He is mainly active in anti-racist networks as well as in climate movements and movements for a sustainable peasant agriculture. He works in a network to support farm workers in vegetable production and co-founded the network Afrique-Europe-Interact, which unites West African and European grassroots movements. As a journalist, he has translated and edited several books by people on the move. Behr is a research associate at Diskurs. Das Wissenschaftsnetz and a member of the board of trustees of the aid organisation medico international. His latest book, Globale Solidarität. Wie wir die imperiale Lebensweise überwinden und die sozial-ökologische Transformation umsetzen. has been published by Oekom Verlag in paperback.

Nina Svanda studied spatial planning and development at TU Wien and worked from 1996-2004 in a planning office in national and international municipal and regional development projects in Austria and South America. Since 2004 she has been teaching and researching at the Institute of Spatial Planning at TU Wien. In 2013, she completed her dissertation on "Building Bridges -The contribution of planning for bridging the gap between emergency recovery and longterm development cooperation". The topics of disasters and crises and how these can be managed or prevented with the support of spatial planning run through her teaching, research and project activities and have led her from natural disasters to warlike conflicts and currently to the climate crisis as a research focus. Climate-appropriate spatial planning and its implementation at the regional and city-regional level are of particular concern to Nina Svanda.

16 h Schillerplatz
Panel discussion: How does the climate crisis influence art and art production?
The panel discussion organized by ÖH.Akbild about sustainability and Art will address the effects of the climate crisis with regard to questions about current art production with guests from Artists for Future, Museums for Future and artists. Participants: Maria Christine Holter von Artists for Future, Elisabeth Feinig von Museums for Future, Georg Russegger, Wissenstransfer Zentrum, und Vizerektor Werner Skvara

Maria Christine Holter is an internationally active art historian, curator and programmer for contemporary art. She is also the author of numerous relevant publications and works in the field of art communication. Initiated by director Werner Boote, Holter is a co-founder of Artists For Future Austria and has been acting on the organizing team and as an activist for this alliance of the Fridays For Future movement since 2019.

Elisabeth Feinig is a cultural educator, environmental educator, curator, designer and activist. Her master's thesis was dedicated to the topic "Museums as allies of a climate-friendly transformation - fields of action and potentials". She is a co-founder of the Museums For Future movement, where she continues to campaign nationally and internationally for a climate-just future.

17 h Exhibit Gallery
Discussion: Ecologically Responsible Exhibition-Making
In light of the ongoing socio-political, ecological and economic crises, the art industry’s focus has been increasingly put on notions of care, solidarity, and ecological becoming. The industry's reliance and dependence on cheap flights, fossil energy, and material accumulation has led many practitioners to explore the transformative potential of institutions toward a more sustainable and greener model. How can we change our conditions and means of production while being situated in the context of neoliberal global capitalism?
Ewa Chomicka, Christopher J. Garthe, and Elke Krasny will speak. Moderated and conceptualized by Mirela Baciak and Fanny Hauser.

Zoom-Link:
https://akbild-ac-at.zoom.us/j/96021371546
Meeting-ID: 960 2137 1546

17 h Schillerplatz
Anna Khodorkovskaya - "Texten" 
Drawing makes it possible to be artistically and politically active even in confined spaces and with limited economic resources. Anna Khodorkovskaya provides guidance for artistic self-expression in the workshop, which combines current emancipating contemporary drawing practices, political articulation and solidarity-based aesthetic practice.

18 h Schillerplatz
Finissage chalk drawing The Bigger Picture

18:15 h Academy Aula, Schillerplatz
Against fossil capitalism! Creating Awareness and Acting Activist with Art
In the concluding panel on questions of art, climate and activism, the artist Katrin Hornek and the artist Oliver Ressler will discuss perspectives of contemporary artistic interventions on the climate crisis with Vice Rector Ingeborg Erhart and the participants of the Action Day. The starting points are the works of the two artists, in order to lead a discussion on the question of the effectiveness of artistic forms of protest in the light of overall social tendencies. To what extent can the artistic highlighting of grievances and actions have an effect beyond the merely symbolic and initiate real social changes? Can artistic strategies be used to fight fossil capitalism?

Oliver Ressler (Photo: Lineematiche, Luca Guadagnini), Katrin Hornek (Photo: Eva Engelbert)

Katrin Hornek, alumna of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, winner of the Otto Mauer Prize 2021 and operator of the WWTF-funded interdisciplinary research project “The Anthropocene Surge - evolution, expansion and depth of Vienna's urban environment”, has for years pursued an artistic approach that examines how effects of capitalism, colonialism and exploitation are inscribed in the constitution of the earth.

Oliver Ressler, a graduate of the University of Applied Arts, is an artist, filmmaker and activist. The climate crisis and forms of resistance are topics he has been working on for a long time, demonstrating that environmental issues are inextricably linked to economic and socio-political content. In his FWF research project “Barricading the Ice Sheets”, which has been running since 2019, he traces mobilisations, activities, assemblies and work meetings of climate activists and accompanies actions of civil disobedience.

19:30 h Academy, Inner Courtyard 2
Beneficial student´s bar of the Studio Drawing. All revenue will be donated to Greenpeace.