Performance artist Claudia Bosse discovered a wasteland behind the main train station that no one felt responsible for. Now she is allowed to use it for a whole year.
“Meadow sage” is written on a small sign. “Narrow-leaved ragwort” on another. White goosefoot, annual fleabane, blue viper’s bugloss, tansy and sainfoin are also represented. Plants that take over areas that no one else cares for.
The only difference is that this is not a classic Gstätten, but an area in the middle of Vienna’s most central urban development area. A teardrop-shaped place, 2500 square meters in size, embedded between Karl-Popper-Straße and Alfred-Adler-Straße, bordered to the north by the main train station, to the south by Helmut-Zilk-Park, which officially marks the beginning of the new Sonnwendviertel.
The area, teardrop-shaped at the top of the Helmut Zilk Park. Google Maps
“As if he didn’t even exist”
“I kept walking past this place,” says performance artist Claudia Bosse. “Nobody paid any attention to it. That’s also a bit of a problem: This place has no function. It seemed as if it didn’t even exist.” Curious, Bosse began to research: Who owns the area? And what is planned here? No one seemed to be responsible – until at some point the ÖBB discovered that it was the owner of the property on the former freight station site.
A perfect place for the artist with her great love of spaces in between, of the unnoticed, “whether in the artistic, between genres or even in the urban.” “Haunted Landscapes” is the name of her current series of works in which she deals with “wounded, unnoticed or differently inhabited landscapes” “in order to reflect on how we relate to our environment.”
Napoleon and nuclear waste
She began in Seestadt, “this vision of the urban,” where she worked with a large team of performers on a building site on the border between what had already been built and what had not yet been built, at the site of the battle between Napoleon and the Austrian troops, “where many dead are hidden in the ground.” Another work was dedicated to Gustav Mahler’s composing house near Lake Wörthersee, where his daughter died three years after he had written the Kindertotenlieder here.
In a certain sense, Bosse also comes from such a “haunted landscape”: she grew up in Salzgitter in Lower Saxony, where a former mine is now used as a nuclear waste repository, “and the storage methods are so precarious that it creates a major problem.” She has lived in Vienna since the 1990s, since a project in the former St. Marx slaughterhouse. What energy and resources do we need, what traces do we leave behind? These are questions that interest her.
The Press/PW
Trained as a director at the Ernst Busch University in Berlin, Claudia Bosse began early on to be less interested in theater stages than in spaces, working immersively before the word for it was ubiquitous. Bert Brecht, of course, has accompanied her to this day. “Thinking about the constitution of society using aesthetic means is important to me.” On the wasteland in the Sonnwendviertel, this initially meant removing the large amount of garbage that had accumulated here.
Botanists identify the plants
She then went on a journey of discovery with her group Theatercombinat and people from her Public Performance School, founded in 2021. With the help of botanists from the University of Vienna, the plants that had been slumbering in the soil or had been blown in were identified.
Blue viper’s bugloss is one of the typical pioneer plants. Teresa Schaur-Wünsch
Paleontologist Mathias Harzhauser from the Natural History Museum reported on the steppe landscape that once existed here and the mammoths that lived here. In recent days there has been a sunrise concert and two performative interventions as part of a KÖR project for art in public spaces, and the third will follow on Tuesday, showing images of other “haunted landscapes”.
Intervention with a fabric object. Markus Gradwohl
In the meantime, the ÖBB has invited her to use the area for another year. She would like to see the place as an open studio, says Bosse. And next year she would like to develop a performance once a week.
Performance on the wasteland: today, Tuesdayday, 6.30 p.m.
„Haunted Landscapes“ im Tanzquartier: 24.–26. 10., Artist Talk am 25. 10.
