An urban space is given a specific signature. The participating (groups of) artists perceived the Fischerstiege as an urban organism and gave the space a second, hidden, shape – an “alter ego” – by means of their artistic constructions. By sharpening or disguising its contours this “alter ego” was supposed to contribute to the appearance of the original shape.

According to Viennese chronicles the Fischerstiege and the Salvatorgasse are located in one of the oldest spots in Vienna: Legends and official historiography meet each other on the border of the inner city and turn this area into a place with an exciting profile. Once a fishing village and historically very old the neighborhood of the Fischerstiege has always been a place of trade and historical departures. Two essential Gemeindebauten [residential estates of the Municipality of Vienna] from the postwar period adjoin to middle-class houses and the Old City Hall. The Fischerstiege was the site of the civic revolutionaries’ defense against the imperial troops in 1848. Moreover, the archives of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance in the Old City Hall, where the crimes of National Socialism in Austria are documented and scientifically investigated, are located in close vicinity to it.

Especially in the nineteen nineties, a number of art-related activities were or still are accommodated in the area of Fischerstiege/Salvatorgasse: several workshops and showrooms, a small publishing house, a bookshop, a number of social spaces. The there resident museum in progress expressed an art outside the galleries, on public billboards, in daily newspapers. Not far from there, at the Salzgries, a branch of the University of Applied Arts Vienna is located. First and foremost, these interventions aimed at making these significant places visible by means of these constructions and at sharpening the local population’s awareness for the public space in this particular environment.

Text extract: Roland Schöny, Getrude Moser-Wagner, in: Public Art Vienna. Departures - Works - Interventions. 2004 - 2007.