maskelknie hoffensdick is an inroad into the day-to-day life of Vienna’s 8th district. It is a call to face up to equality and to acknowledge fragmentation and discrepancies of human diasporas in the urban environment. And also a measure to replace actionist negotiations about the city with clear-cut activity. From dysfunction to livability.

maskelknie hoffensdick is a sculptural project. Its point is to make the city a sculptural task and reconquer it as a living space of societies, thereby overcoming a chauvinistic as well as virile culture of displacement in the development, design and use of the city. Silke Brösskamp provides a proposal for sculptural awareness as constructional awareness—a recommendation of an architectural language and sensibility for the materiality of the city. This is where one of the crucial forces of sculpture lies: generating, through an understanding of social corporeality, impulses for the comprehension and the functioning of urbanity.

The consequence is to rebuild the Western city contrary to its status as sanctuary of an essentially patriarchal legacy of social design. This is the only way to organize the future of the city and its biotopes in mutual permeability.

maskelknie hoffensdick puts to the test the genuine feminine as a phenomenon of Eros in the sense of a generative force of morphogenesis and examines the concentrate of patriarchy as the necrophile will to displace.

maskelknie hoffensdick also is a critical reading of the Kubus, without being an autodafé of feminism. By occupying the Kubus EXPORT, a physical and social image carrier, the project takes a stance against the affirmative culture of the safe space and makes a gesture of self-exposure. With no distance to the public, the work (the inroad) dwells in/around the Kubus for two weeks, dwells among the people of the 8th district, in the city. As if it had always been there. It is the allegory of the unswerving construction of a pan-societal vision. It leads over to truths of life and is a pragmatic call for an urban, societal will to creation.

Not least, it is about the unmasking of a historically grown, dysfunctional, damaged society. Silke Brösskamp uses the transitions between virtual and analog space for the purpose, between history, the now and continuity, so as to generate insights as well as a recommendation for action.

The city turns into a sculptural impetus for sincere profiles and outlines of action.

Text: Isabel Hufschmidt

Translation: Michael Strand