Karta-Bar Schaan

YEAR

2019

LOCATION

Schaan

INSTITUTION

Verein ELF

When spatial development is treated as a cultural practice, the people who inhabit a place become the experts of its future.

Schaan was the first focus municipality of Verein ELF, an institution founded by Luis Hilti and Toni Büchel as a long-horizon cultural infrastructure for spatial development in Liechtenstein. The association is part of Atelier Gapont.

In the freshly restored Gamanderstall we set up the Karta-Bar — part exhibition, part workshop, part bar — and ran it on a single principle: the more difficult the subject, the more convivial the setting must be.

The year began at the scale of the country. A topographic model of Liechtenstein — six hundred tiles, red on one side, green on the other — was laid out on the floor; each tile carried a dish that, once emptied, had to be flipped, slowly producing a collective zoning plan as the meal progressed.

It was conceived less as a venue than as a discursive arena: a temporary public space in which residents and visitors could reflect on territory and speculate about its possible futures.

Debates on the widening of the Rhine, public transport systems, urbanity and the future of the Liechtenstein Alps then brought experts, officials and residents into the same room.

Each evening was visually recorded by an artist.

Rather than a single conclusion, the year produced an archive.

Artists including Adam Vogt, Eliane Schädler, Alina Sonea, Roman Beck and Luigi Olivadoti translated the discussions into new maps of the country.

In the middle of one discussion a carpenter warned against overdesign: "All we talk about is building and designing for the next generation. But maybe they just want to sit on a stoop and smoke cigarettes. They'll need excavators to undo our planning."

The pilot established the formats, the partnerships and the audience that have since carried Verein ELF from one Liechtenstein municipality to the next, building the kind of discursive palimpsest no individual master plan can produce.