Unlearning
Imperial Architectures
From Within
with Marlene Wagner#feminisms #empire #designresearch
“Rehearsals in nonimperial thinking are necessary,” writes Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “to ask how this unstoppable movement storms through citizens […] destroying what they cherish: their worlds, their ways of being with others, their very capacity for reciprocity.”
Departing from Architecten-Ball-Tänze op. 36/RV 36 (1847) by the composer Johann Strauss, his first dedication to a society ball in the imperial capital, the workshop questions the imperial architectural legacies of Vienna. Arriving with VAS² 2025 at Otto Wagner´s buildings of Care and Cure of the Mentally and Nervously Ill (1907) we will explore possible practices of unlearning through spatial, bodily, and archival engagement with the city’s past and present.
The spatial practice of waltzing, swaying or oscillating, will serve us as a circular gesture and methodology to navigate across time, centre and periphery, theory and practice, improvisation and plan. In reference to the multiple meanings of the waltz as dance, music and movement, waltzing is further conceived as a technique of fabrication and transformation (walzen), a compaction device and construction machine (Walze) as well as wandering apprenticeship (Walz).
Together we will engage with compositions of body, object, and space as material of knowledge, sense, and rhythm via theoretical readings, site visits, joint exercises and invited companions from architecture, history, and the performing arts.
We will question the crafted journey of historicism, modernism and the mastery of their building sites. We will be waltzing the era of the barricades, the epoch of reviving Renaissance, Baroque and Gothic style, the age of the Industrial Revolution, World Exhibition and the Fin-de-Siècle described as the period of fundamental cultural change. Times when female identifying architects did not exist?
We will think, design and document rehearsals of unlearning imperial architectures from within by drawing on design and participatory action research, feminist theory, and postcolonial critique. The aim of the workshop is to equip all participants through the collective experience, critical reflection, and histories in action.
Marlene Wagner practices, researches and teaches in the framework of "Social Architecture". Transdisciplinarity and transformation guide her work on space and design at the intersections of theory and practice, design research, feminist and postcolonial critique. As a co-founder of the non-profit architecture practice buildCollective she realised awarded transnational projects of educational, social and technical infrastructures. She has been teaching at the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, Vienna University of Technology, University of Art and Design Linz, Carinthia University of Applied Sciences a.o. She designs and develops formats of learning and tools engagement and has been instrumental in the set-up of an urban mobility lab. Marlene is part of the Claiming*Spaces Collective at TU Wien, international research projects, and co-founder of the Vienna Architecture Summer School.
www.marlenewagner.online
︎︎︎MEDIA:
body, text, analog & digital documentation
︎︎︎LOCATION: main location as well as a series of site visits
︎︎︎TEACHING LANGUAGE: english & german (if applicable)
︎︎︎WHAT TO BRING: notebook, mobile phone, camera, favorite pen and paper
︎︎︎REQUIREMENTS: joy
︎︎︎MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 5
︎︎︎LOCATION: main location as well as a series of site visits
︎︎︎TEACHING LANGUAGE: english & german (if applicable)
︎︎︎WHAT TO BRING: notebook, mobile phone, camera, favorite pen and paper
︎︎︎REQUIREMENTS: joy
︎︎︎MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 5