Creating Encounters with Communities and Places

Using walking as a performative medium and banner-making as a form of publishing, a procession with banners and signs moves from Living Lab in Hirschstetten to the Angewandte. We materialize traces, collaborative gestures, and collective statements as basis for action. Living Lab is a social hub in a former kindergarten on the periphery of Vienna, which hosted us throughout the semester. From there, we explored how artistic strategies can be embedded in everyday social contexts and meaningfully engage local communities. Greetings from Hirschstetten! We also present findings from encounters in Eisenerz, a shrinking mining town in the Styrian mountains. There, we engaged in processes of mutual learning from and with citizens who maintain and adapt social infrastructures during regional-scale transformation. Local initiatives and knowledge provided the ground for creative practices, and for listening and sharing across generations, contexts and abilities. Proudly, we present BA projects of the first cohort of students to complete the new degree of Transformation Studies. Art x Science!