What would you do in my place in Vienna?

We asked this question to 38 people – our friends and co-workers - and we recorded their answers that reflect their views about a place they know only in a mediated way, but which is more or less physically inaccessible to them. We tried to realize the actions they asked us to do in Vienna and symbolically fulfilling their wishes. We documented these actions and we have sent postcards of these actions to their initiators.

The people we have interviewed are associated to the projects of the contemporary art space h.arta, in Timisoara (Romania), a space run by our group. The majority of the people who gave us their answers travelled very little outside Romania and have never been to Vienna. Even for the ones who visited Vienna before, this wasn’t something they would do on a regular basis, but it was a kind of exceptional event. Although borders are open for Romanian citizens, the economic conditions make travelling very difficult. All of their answers – the playful ones as well as the more serious ones – reflect the fact that they see the West only as a space they could encounter as tourists and not as an environment where they could perform professionally. Just to be here, to stay in this hardly accessible place seems to be enough.

What would you do in my place in Vienna? is a project that is mediating the ideas of pleasure, communications, and comparisons connected to the traveling from one (art) context to another one.

1-30th of June 2003, residence in Vienna offered by A9 Transeuropa
(Museums Quartier); the project was presented in our room, inside Museums Quartier