Platz nehmen #5: Let's stick with the Unicorns – Aesthetic Consequences of Care, Tidying and Re.use

With artistic interventions by students, a lecture and discussion by and with climate researcher Helga Kromp-Kolb, the Construction Choir, and the performative Summer Showing by the Department of Art and Intervention | Performance.

Let's stick with the Unicorns is a large-scale artistic intervention at Schillerplatz that examines public space as a concrete ecological and social situation. At its core is the question of how artistic practice can remain effective under conditions of ecological crisis. Transformation is not understood as a goal or a promise for the future, but as a present practice. The artistic works use existing materials, vegetation, traces of use, and temporal processes to actively position themselves against existing capitalist climate narratives. The artistic explorations are temporary, reversible, and site-specific.

Through the conscious use of resources, the acceptance of change, decay, and transience, the space can be experienced as a dynamic structure. Let's stick with the Unicorns refers to an attitude of active agency and personal responsibility under restrictive conditions and highlights the need not to distance oneself or succumb to cynicism despite scientifically described tipping points and irreversible processes.

The event begins two days before the main event, on May 11. These first two days are dedicated to lectures and various interventions. On the third day, May 13, the project opens with the format Platz nehmen #5 for collective reflection and invites the public to actively participate in the program: In a lecture, climate researcher Helga Kromp-Kolb will speak about planetary boundaries, social responsibility, and scope for action. The performative Summer Showing by the Department of Art and Time I Performance and the performance by the Construction Choir Collective expand the artistic-scientific discourse to include physical, temporal, and collective dimensions. Different forms of knowledge and expression enter into a relationship with one another without being hirarchically ordered.

In Let's stick with the Unicorns, Schillerplatz becomes a place where ecological reality, artistic practice, and social responsibility are not negotiated separately, but simultaneously.

Concept: Transformation group Akbild
Steffi Alte,Kirsten Borchert, Veronika Dirnhofer, Theresa Eipeldauer, Zahra Mirza,
Noele Ody, Rainer Prohaska, Tomash Schoiswohl, Ruby Sircar, Saskia Te Nicklin

Participants: Juhyun Lee, Loreen Schmid, Istvan Antal, Katarina Michelitsch, Jee Hyun, Elizabet Son, Adam Hudec, Victoria Dräxler, Heidi Rosenberger, Flora Franke, Mariia Pylypenko & Boyun Park, Wenfei Zhao, Sophie Greistorfer, Zoe Glasenapp, Jeremias Rumpl, Nico Schleicher, Kweku Okokroko, Natália Zajačiková, Mathea Magdalena, Barbora Chen & Carla Bobadilla, Hanna Schimek, Roman Berleth & Rafael Hofmann, Stella Schwaiger, Vitus Mages, Hannah Parth & David Ristić, Luis Penn, Rasmus Rutsch, Renee Salome Tischer, Vik Bayer (Klasse für alle), Robin Food, Irene Lucas, Construction Choir Collective

Project lead: Claudia Kaiser, Academy | Art  | Public Sphere

Program

16 h
Softening the Ground 
Participatory Drawing Performance
Bodies lie on their backs, a sheet of paper on their stomachs. Beneath them, the ground; above them, the sky. The gaze explores the space; the hand follows. Drawing appears not as an autonomous gesture, but as a reaction to what surrounds and permeates the body. The horizontal position shifts the relationship to the world: less control, more exposure. Perception and action reveal themselves as embedded in conditions we do not determine ourselves. Thus, drawing becomes a practice in which interconnections become tangible—between body, environment, and material. We are with one another or we are not at all. (Donna J. Haraway)

16:30 h
Welcome: Johan F. Hartle, Rector 
Introduction: Conceptual Group

16:45 h
What does climate protection have to do with peace?
Lecture by Helga Kromp-Kolb followed by a discussion
There is no sustainability without peace and no peace without sustainability—so states the UN’s Agenda 2030. This will be discussed in the context of the climate crisis.
Helga Kromp-Kolb (born 1948 in Vienna) is an Austrian climate researcher and professor emerita of meteorology. She is one of the leading voices for climate protection in the German-speaking world and is strongly committed to bringing scientific findings into politics and society.

18 h
Summer Showing 
Performances by the Studio Art and Time | Performance
Focusing on social and material sustainability, the Summer Showing by the Studio of Art and Time | Performance presents live performances and installation works. Taking Schillerplatz—a space that has evolved over time—as its starting point, walking, movement, and sound intertwine with the tensions present on site: trees, plants, and birds encounter sealed surfaces and hidden, sometimes unexplained stories. The focus is on performative, collaborative processes of exchange between people, plants, space, and materials.

19:30 h
Construction Choir Collective 
Concert 
Construction Choir Collective CCC take choral music beyond concert halls, making it accessible to all - in public spaces, unexpected environments and contexts. The repertoire spans medieval madrigals, folk music, and contemporary experimental works. CCC is a multilingual organism rewriting itself through everybody that enters it: an artistic collective, led by conductors Pavel Naydenov, Magdalena Hubauer, and Johannes Steinmann.