Michael Zinganel: Tracing Spaces
02.06.26, 6 pm
Tracing Spaces, founded in 2012 by Michael Hieslmair and Michael Zinganel as an independent interdisciplinary research platform in Vienna, conceives and produces projects, exhibitions, publications, and educational formats on the themes of urban history and urban research, mobility, tourism, and migration, as well as research-based art and artistic research projects, primarily in public spaces.
Starting from the mobility routes and rhythms of migrant workers in tourist-oriented Alpine valleys in Tyrol, the sites of investigation were expanded from the endpoints of commuting movements to stopping points along transportation routes: highway rest stops, informal markets, border crossings, bus stations, ferry ports, etc. In the process, mobile research methods and techniques of representation were successively developed, combining cartography and narrative to convey both the micropolitical mobility experiences of individuals and the overarching macro-political goals of (supra)national institutions and private companies.
Since summer 2015, Tracing Spaces has operated a project space at Vienna’s Nordwestbahnhof, one of the last inner-city logistics hubs, where, embedded within the social milieu of the logistics landscape, a multi-layered multimedia cartography of the migration and mobility experiences of actors working there has been gradually created. This includes several installations on the vacant lot dedicated to specific thematic complexes, including the role of the station during the Nazi era.
Michael Zinganel graduated at the faculty of Architecture at Graz University of Technology, studied art at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and obtained a PhD in contemporary history at the University of Vienna. He had been board member and curator at Forum Stadtpark in Graz, a research fellow at the IFK (International Centre for Cultural Studies) in Vienna, and taught at various universities and academies, e.g. at TU Graz, Kunst-Uni Linz, AAU Klagenfurt, currently at the postgraduate academy of Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and TU Vienna. In 2012 he co-founded the independent research institute Tracing Spaces, also producing and co-editing the travelling exhibition and publication Holiday after the Fall – Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia (with Elke Beyer and Anke Hagemann)(Berlin: jovis 2013). 2014–16 he was research associate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and head of research of „Stop and Go: Nodes of Transformation and Transition“ investigating the production and appropriation of spaces alongside pan-European Traffic Corridors between the East and West of Europe. He is also editorial board member of the journal Transfers.
Michael Zinganel was invited as part of the Department of Architecture, Urban Planning, and Landscape Architecture.
The event will be held in German.
Photo:
Michael Zinganel (left) & Michael Hieslmair (right) © Photo: Heribert Corn 2015