A…is for Magical Realism

with 
 Marlene Wagner and Beatrice Aimée
#design research  #african futurism #decolonial feminism


“Even though the future is yet to come, it shapes our experience in profound ways. It defines what the past means to us and how we bring it into our present moment.” - Ainehi Edoro-Glines, (Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of Other Times, Spaces, and Worlds. 2024)

The design workshop deals with Vienna’s present, past and future through Magical Realism, as a methodology blending the fantastical with the everyday, integrating the impossible into the realistic, and making planetary futures a matter of course!
Understanding magic not as a departure from reality, but as a metaphorical and material lens to (re)construct a symbolic as much as a physical city model.

The capital A…., the first letter in the alphabetical order, arché - the beginning or first principal in philosophy, A as in Architecture, Africa, Austria, Art or Avantgarde, orientates the design research and acknowledges Africa as a shaping force of European Modernism and Sustainable Architecture, Art and Science for centuries.

Rosa-Luxemburg-Hof, Vienna's largest social housing complex of the interwar period and eclectic model as City in a City, serves as a starting point to investigate Ideas of communal infrastructure across time, scale, Reality and Fiction.

Guided by Africanfuturism, rooted in real-life issues while transgressing universalised western understanding of space and time, we will be designing and thinking the magical, the surreal, and the ancestral dimension of Architecture.

We will engage in literature and architecture across centuries and continents, with authors and concepts like Space Magicians, Magic Architecture, Solar Punk, African Spatial Thinking and practices of (de)colonising. Further we will welcome guests from Architecture, Literature, Political Science and Cultural Studies dispersed across the African and European continent.

We will be decentering the model of the plausible, probable, possible and preferable future, collectively re-building narratives and re-searching form. Our hands will be moving, sharing and processing stories into spatial narratives.


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 transnational projects of educational, social and technical buildings and 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. Marlene has been instrumental in the set-up of an urban mobility lab and designs and develops diverse formats of learning and tools engagement. Her work has been internationally published, exhibited and awarded. She  is part of the Claiming*Spaces Collective at TU Wien, international research projects, and co-founder of the Vienna Architecture Summer School https://www.marlenewagner.online

Beatrice Aimée studied architecture in Venice and graduated with distinction at Vienna University of Technology. As a young practitioner her emphasis is based on regenerative material practices, vernacular knowledge and culturally rooted forms of spatial production. Her work is guided by a holistic understanding of space, grounded in the earth and its materials. She has been involved in sociocratic cooperative housing projects and social housing projects in Vienna with WUParchitektur. Beatrice implemented educational projects with the non-profit architecture practice Archifair and leads building and material workshops with the association YEB – Young Earth Builders. Personal interests have led her to mix her hands in various small to medium construction projects, in artistic and agriculture projects with Kleine Stadtfarm and Die Feldversuche, in exhibition and cultural work with the African Diaspora Community, as well as taking long-distance cycling journeys across West Africa.


︎︎︎ MEDIA  analog/digital storying, writing and modelling

︎︎︎ LOCATION school grounds and site visits

︎︎︎ TEACHING LANGUAGE English (German,Italian, French, Romanian, if applicable)

︎︎︎ WHAT TO BRING notebook, camera, phone, pens, and your favourite tool/device

︎︎︎ REQUIREMENTS  joy

︎︎︎ MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS  6

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