53

Standing less than one-hundred meters away from the celebrated Hundertwasserhaus landmark, the Palais’s iconic architecture is often stumbled upon by a constant flow of tourists and pedestrians. The occasional photo is taken, but when visitors leave the sight, they're left knowing little, if anything, about the violent past hidden beneath its ornate façade.

‍

Site Traffic deals with the public perception of the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien. Using photos shared on social media and referencing images found in Atelier Bachwitz publications, the project explores how cultural value is attributed to a place, and how it can be constructed, manipulated, and lost through immaterial modes of exchange.

‍

From being looked at to looking at, Anna Weberberger has been working with the official Instagram account of the Palais as more than just an institutional extension. Framed by the format of the feed, post by post, both the image as well as the narrative of the Palais are curated; questioning, using, and misusing its digital agency.

‍

“There‘s a FedEx bus parked outside. FedEx Express. Outfit change. Der Postler betritt das Gebäude. Klaus, du musst hochgehen. Und dann stellst du dich dahin. When they don’t take photos, they sit and look at the photos they just took. I learn this step is equally as important as the posing. I see unsatisfied girlfriends. Here goes round two. Three? Four? He gets up, she makes her way to the phone booth. Did Hundertwasser design this? I’ve heard of the name Bachwitz.”

‍

The inverted gaze of the Palais's Instagram account expresses a longing for attention and a form of site maintenance that's deliberately ambivalent. As a silent observer, the Palais becomes a passer-by and a consumer. An entity filled with taste, boredom, and desire who likes other people's presentations of themselves and the city around them.

‍

When tourism equals content creation, the (mostly) female subjects who pose in front of sights become emblems of this time. Content creators make Gründerzeit fashionable again, and Anna Weberberger wears the Palais as a costume. While scrolling through historic Vienna, she asks how contemporary care behaves, and if the economy of attention is a legitimate scale for cultural value.

‍

As a way to engage with patterns of behavior surrounding landmarks, a series of event scores were created and shared both on and off site.

‍

Move to the left a little bit.

Smile?

Now it looks exactly like the picture you showed me on Instagram.

‍