Public Art

An evolving cartographic billboard within a Viennese bus stop.
Macondo, a remarkable place on the outskirts of Vienna, exists between an airport, a freeway and the imagination. Shaped by memory and the hard realities of life, it's a settlement where successive waves of political refugees arriving from the current headlining global wars have been thrown together with villagers who landed here and reconstructed their lives up to 50 years ago. Macondo, named in homage to the fictional village in Gabriel Garcia Marquez' s novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude", is now home to 3000 people.
For decades these people fought for a bus stop to link their community with the heart of Vienna and eventually they succeeded; the Zinnergasse-Kaserne 73a bus stop now stands proudly at the entrance to Macondo. This autonomous area has grown outside the traditional municipal structures resulting in a district with few surfaced roads, streetlights, signs or street names. Outsiders navigating through Macondo have little idea of where to go or how to get there. Michael Pinsky has worked with the Austrian performance group Cabula and the residents of Macondo to chart out the area, its past, present and future. The resulting large-scale map has been mounted on a billboard wall within Bus Stop 73a. Those waiting for their bus as well as passersby can add new information, missing names, locations, graffiti and teenage declarations of love and disdain, thereby becoming the primary actors in a continually evolving exhibition. Their additions will be absorbed into the plan, as the map is frequently reprinted over the following several months, reversing the conventional relationship between civic information and personal perception.
Inaugurated on April 5th 2009.
For more information please visit www.michaelpinsky.com