With a wall design for a 2024 completed municipal building named after Willi Resetarits in Laxenburger Strasse (architecture: Pichler & Traupmann Architekten), the City of Vienna continues its long tradition of art in municipal buildings. The artist Johanna Kandl has won the competition organized by KÖR Wien together with WIGEBA, Wiener Gemeindewohnungs Baugesellschaft m.b.H.

Her design “Be a mensch” commemorates the work and legacy of Willi Resetarits (1948-2022). More than any other line, this quote characterizes the musician and human rights activist who had a gift for bringing together the most diverse social and cultural groups. A “mensch”—the German word for “human being” entered American English via Yiddish—is a person of integrity and honor.

It is this appeal to our humanity and the play with language as an expression of diversity and inclusion that Johanna Kandl picks up on in her wall painting for the Willi-Resetarits-Hof. Paintes CDs and records cover the façade, each labeled with the word for “human being” in one of twenty-seven languages other than German that are spoken by large communities in Vienna. Set off by a blue background, the circular media appear to be floating up toward the sky. The limited palette of light hues quotes the coloration of classical fresco painting, a mural technique with a long tradition in Austria that Kandl has used for wall designs on several occasions.

Her painting on the ceiling of the passageway to the courtyard, too, is reminiscent of the skies in Baroque frescoes: the interplay of matte and glossy surfaces and the grooves of the vinyl records, some of them executed in relief, engender an impression of spatial depth. In this part of the work, located where a record store was a tenant for many years, the faces of the LPs and CDs are inscribed with the titles of songs that Willi Resetarits performed with various formations.

The sound storage media are an especially apt choice of motif for Johanna Kandl, who has long dedicated herself to studying the history stored up in the materials of painting and deftly uses their physicality to convey her ideas.

“What could be more important now than coming together, allowing oneself to hear different languages and registers, meeting others face to face.” (Johanna Kandl)