Who We Are, What We Do and How We Do It

We are a multi-disciplinary team investigating the narrative nature of landscapes. In the process, new questions arise about how we see and use landscapes within stories of everyday life, work, science, politics, fiction, movies, dreams, or the news. These allow us to think about land use from a variety of viewpoints that are not primarily defined by a particular position in space or visually, but rather by the narrative context of meanings that shape the spatial relations within which we conduct our lives: relations that we believe to be of a narrative nature and by means of which we interpret and make use of our physical world.

What We Do

By using language as one of the most powerful tools to create spaces and places, we are trying to challenge common ideas of landscape production. We are particularly concerned with vernacular environments and how everyday stories and mythologies act and simultaneously are enacted in these environments.

How We Do It

By appropriating industrial techniques and scientific methods from story-based practices, such as screen writing or Michael Bakhtin’s chronotope analysis, we are investigating plot-place relationships, genre-specific use of space, and underlying subtexts and motives. In doing so, we are producing new kinds of spaces and Handlungsräume based on narratives that are already out there or should be.

Who We Are

LEOPOLD CALICE was trained as a chef and worked in Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, and Austria. He later studied Landscape Design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He is interested in ephemeral interventions allowing for a new interpretation of places and the creation of (imaginative) spaces.

LAURENT FATHOLLAZADEH was born in Paris in 1966 and studied cultural anthropology and philosophy at Paris Descartes University – Paris V at the Sorbonne and at the EHESS. He is also an expressionist painter and Tango dancer.

CHRISTINA LINORTNER studied Architecture in Vienna and Delft and Visual Cultures in London. She works trans-disciplinarily in the fields of housing culture and transculturality, among others.

ELISABETH MARKO was born in Graz, Austria and grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In 2010, she graduated in Landscape Design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her work focuses on the embodied experience of space and time, in view of the fact that our perception of reality is, to a certain extent, a construction of our imagination.

TARIQUE QAYUMI was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up in Vancouver, Canada. He graduated with an MFA from UCLA in Theater, Film, and Television. Currently, he is the writer, director, and producer of the Real Life Heroes series for TOLO TV, Afghanistan’s most popular and progressive TV station.

STEVE ROWELL is an artist, curator, and researcher based in Los Angeles. His spatial practice involves overlapping aspects and perceptions of technology, culture, and infrastructure on, beneath, and above the landscape – contextualizing the built and the natural environments, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and cartographer. Photography, video, and audio field recordings are the mediums of his projects, often exhibited as installations or as public interventions.

EDITH SCHWARZL is a narrative psychologist and psychotherapist practicing in Vienna, Austria. She is interested in the stories we live and tell. She explores narratives and counter-narratives in everyday life, literature, and film and currently investigates human/landscape relations.

HANNAH STIPPL is an artist based in Vienna. She teaches Landscape Design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and recently finished her PhD on Swiss landscape theorist Lucius Burckhardt.

GERHARD TREML is an American/Austrian artist based in Vienna. His practice explores narrative strategies in order to appropriate, investigate, and reconfigure spatial relations basic to our construction of reality. His work relies on scripting, drawing, staged photography, and installation. He is currently directing the collaborative art-based research program “Eden’s Edge” in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

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