alte Sennerei Balzers

YEAR

2020

LOCATION

Balzers

COLLABORATION

Realschule Balzers

Kunstschule Liechtenstein

Karta-Bar (former Sennerei), Burghügel, Realschule Balzers, Kunstschule Liechtenstein

INSTITUTION

Verein ELF

Public space is less a place than a practice.

Balzers was the second focus municipality of Verein ELF, which forms part of Atelier Gapont. In the village centre stood a vacant former dairy cooperative — large, central, with a shop window onto the street. We turned it into the year's Karta-Bar.

Opening was planned for March 2020. Then the lockdown arrived.

What was left was the question the moment itself put on the table: what holds public life together when public space disappears?

Until gatherings could resume, we built a blue grandstand in front of the Karta-Bar. Residents came by, one at a time. The conversations, called Karta-Talks, were recorded and released across the year.

Nineteen of them came together — from a primary-school child to a former head of government.

In one of them, the historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger said plainly what many had been saying quietly: "That public space is also an architectural problem."

The shop window of the Sennerei became a second stage. Maps and posters kept the discussion of space visible from the street, even when no one could be inside.

When events could happen again, the Liechtenstein-Relief returned, this time with a planning-buffet that the teacher Ursula Schlegel and her class had cooked.

Just before the second wave, the work was shown on the village street, turned for one evening into a runway.

With the third class of the Realschule Balzers we ran a seven-week project, Balzers verdoppeln, in which teenagers designed a village twice the size of today's — in volumes, streetscapes and the cut of clothes.

Just before the second wave, the work was shown on the village street, turned for one evening into a runway. Adam Vogt's drawing of Balzers became the year's annual map.