VIENNA, AUSTRIA Productive City Vienna: Hidden Windows, Productive Screens

The exhibition highlights the opportunities that the comprehensive field of production provides for a sustainable development of cities, focusing on innovative urban-planning and architecture. Vienna’s contribution shares with Brussels and Madrid the ambition to “treat” the destructive self-portrait of the European city as a clean place of knowledge, services, and culture. This symptom has resulted in production’s 20th century-displacement to other continents, implicating dangerous structural damage, economically, ecologically, and culturally. The exhibition promotes a change in paradigm. It stages Vienna’s specific treatment of the productive city as a fundamental “repair-project”: how to repair the dominant idea of “value” in our cities? How to establish the world of production as a main ingredient to be integrated in the program of sustainable city development?
The installation literally brings into the limelight what has been a blind spot in the European city’s “clean” self-portraits. A bright wallpapered wall and a light tablecloth on a round table welcome the visitors, when they enter the darkened room. Hidden windows make them discover narratives of the productive city’s future. The tablecloth shows Vienna’s productive landscape, the video Productive City reveals playfully Vienna’s plan for the production’s future in 90-seconds. Hybrid products such as chocolate-beer underline the city’s desire to shortcut production with cultural and social affairs.