“I longed for sound protection walls and dreamt that gas would just run out, that all cars would break down and the Tanke would be overgrown with wild meadow flowers of the Wienerwald, that my friends would suddenly turn up and we would have an after-work beer.” (T. Schmale)

In collaboration with Vienna’s 5th district, which also initiated the project, Toni Schmale places her TANKE 24/7 between two wild meadows in Stefan Weber Park. A prop reminiscent of the city’s outskirts lands on a piece of urban fallow land. The musician and composer Stefan Weber, known for his stage shows and happenings with his band Drahdiwaberl, gave his name to this transit zone between the 5th and 12th districts, the “Ring boulevard of the proletariat.”

It is the design of a sculpture that has the form of a gas station with two abstracted gas pumps. The Tanke is a place of communication, a place to recharge one’s batteries in dysfunction. Is the gas station still unfinished, or has the old familiar form been outdated for decades and is only a sign of something past? TANKE 24/7 is the shell construction and ruin of a gas station. The abandoned gas station. The porticos and arcades in Red Vienna’s stately courtyards. Triumphal arches built for workers. The large steel gate as a gas station.

“I know this strip of grass from speeding by, sitting in a car heading out of town to the hardware store on Matzleinsdorfer Platz or crawling back down the Gürtel. Most dominant and memorable is the roar and thunder of the cars. Let’s just meet at the Tanke – the garden pavilion disguised as a dysfunctional gas station, with nothing to consume except what you bring yourself.” (T. Schmale)