We Are Water Lilies - A Fountain Opera

with 
 Teresa Stillebacher & Lino Lanzmaier 
#CommonsInPractice #SpatialReenactment #OneToOneMaking #FountainFictions


The Santleitenhof, the venue of this year’s Vienna Summer School, was at the time of its construction the largest municipal housing project of Red Vienna, featuring a remarkable number of communal facilities: 75 commercial premises, an inn and café, three studios, 58 workshops, 71 storage units, a waste collection point, three bathing and laundry facilities, a pharmacy, three after-school care centres and a post office, as well as the central Matteotti-Platz with its fountain.

In our workshop, we carry forward this tradition of communal and shared spaces by exploring water as a common good. Fountains have historically served as central meeting points and places of exchange within communities and cities. Water has always been more than a resource—it is a site of gathering, leisure, storytelling and collective memory. Wells and fountains were not merely infrastructure but vital social spaces—shaped in part by gender roles—where people gathered, shared resources and connected.

The fountain at Matteotti-Platz becomes the protagonist of an spatial opera production, expanded through a potpourri of architectural fragments, sound, video, historical imagery, text and performance—colliding with everyday occurrences and leisure.

We engage with water as a material of the commons and as a carrier of sound, light, microclimate.
In our workshop we design and build a “Seebühne” (lakeside stage), along with costumes, music and dramaturgy for our collaborative fountain opera, We Are Water Lilies—a speculative act of fabulation rooted in the communal memory of the site.

We draw on historical material from the bathing and laundry facilities, collect objects and material, research on fountains in public space, the tradition of public baths in Red Vienna, complemented by site visits to swimming pools, the Danube, and beyond.
Teresa Stillebacher is an architect, researcher, and artist based in Innsbruck, Austria. She studied architecture at the University of Innsbruck and the Technical University of Berlin, and is a Senior Scientist at ./studio3, Institute for Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck. Her research focuses on 1:1 design-build practices that bring together architectural, artistic, and social questions within a research-based design process. A key aspect of her work is the engagement with found objects, reused materials, and building within existing contexts. Her practice operates at the intersection of architecture, performance, and public space. Since 2018, she has co-run an architecture studio with Lino Lanzmaier in Innsbruck and Vienna, working across scales from interiors to urban interventions. Since 2022, she has been part of the collective AestheticAthletics+ (AA+), developing site-specific, performative interventions that activate urban life and foster collective experience.
http://www.teresastillebacher.eu/
https://aaplus.plus/

Lino Lanzmaier is an architect, researcher, and educator based in Innsbruck, Austria. He teaches at the ./studio3 Institute for Experimental Architecture and is currently pursuing a PhD titled Mess Matters. His work explores the intersection of architectural installation, performativity, and event-based spacemaking. Architectural objects become tools for blending events, performances, cooking, bathing, lectures, listening and sound, questioning how we use, share and perceive public space. His projects are often site-specific, relational, and sculptural emerging from collaborative processes with friends and family such as Teresa Stillebacher, AestheticAthletics+ (AA+), Andreas Zissler, Martina Moro, Fabian Lanzmaier, Pia Prantl, Suna Petersen, Verschubu Records, and columbosnext. Alongside his artistic practice, he has developed projects such as public spaces, renovations, and exhibition designs in collaboration with Teresa Stillebacher. www.linolanzmaier.xyz
︎︎︎ MEDIA  1:1 design-build, found materials, sound, video, text, textile, model-making

︎︎︎ LOCATION Main location, Matteotti Fountain, swimming pools

︎︎︎ TEACHING LANGUAGE English, German

︎︎︎ WHAT TO BRING Drawing materials, laptop, camera, mobile phone, headphones

︎︎︎ REQUIREMENTS  No prerequisites— Joy in working hands-on in a collective process

︎︎︎ MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS  6

︎︎︎