Supersuit – Poetic Interventions in Urban Spaces

Development of the structure

© Michael Wallraff ZT GmbH

Supersuit is an interdisciplinary experiment at the boundary between people and space. It is a tool for poetic interventions in different urban situations, invites participation and questions the relationship between people, space and the city in a sensual form.

As a marker of public space, the spontaneously emerging forms of the SUPERSUIT respond directly to the parameters of the urban context. Supersuit uses performative interventions to change current design processes and conceptualize new human-material constellations.

Performance by Daniel Aschwanden in Vienna, 2014

© Conny Zenk

Supersuit - that is pure idealism: a self-initiated, self-financed and completely autonomous art project in public space, unclassifiable, somewhere between performative architecture or spatial performance.

Supersuit is the prototype of a spatial shell that can be changed interactively and directly connected to a human body. In a cooperation between dancers, architects, artists and engineers, numerous studies, models and spatial experiments were created, as well as a series of concrete performances. The Supersuit was tested on site at various locations in Vienna/Austria, Addis Ababa/Ethiopia and Wuhan/China and located in the respective social fabric.

Supersuit edition

© Michael Wallraff ZT GmbH

This small booklet provides a documentation of our experiments over the last three years and short reflections on performative architecture in public space. It poses questions about the boundaries between public and private, between the individual and the collective, from a completely unusual perspective, from the perspective of a spontaneous space creator, an on-site designer. It is intended to provide food for thought on how to deal with public real space in a time of turbo-capitalism and the general retreat into digital social networks.

One thing is clear: such questions cannot be answered clearly and definitively, but perhaps they can always be illuminated from different angles in a poetic, sometimes playful, sometimes exploratory way. Further reflections and investigations will follow.

Editors: Daniel Aschwanden, Michael Wallraff

Volume of the series EDITION ANGEWANDTE

Publisher: Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel

Language: english

Published: June 26, 2017