Topography of the Social
YEAR
2021
LOCATION
Ruggell
INSTITUTION
Verein ELF
A community's capacity to imagine its future depends not on the plans it produces, but on the conversations it is willing to have — and the spaces it creates to have them in.
Ruggell sits at the northernmost edge of Liechtenstein — flat, facing the Riet nature reserve, bordered by Austria and Switzerland. A municipality that knows exactly where it ends.
The third year of Verein ELF arrived mid-pandemic. After Schaan and Balzers, the question of how people share space had become suddenly, urgently concrete.
Rather than organise the year around a single spatial problem, we took the community itself as the subject.
What are the social topographies — the invisible structures of encounter, memory, and mutual recognition — that give a place its character?
The Küefer-Martis-Huus, a historic cultural centre in the heart of the village, became the year's home.
At the same time, every once in a while we organised events in new locations, such as under the bridge in Unterbendern.
Historical photographs were exchanged for personal memories. Visitors took prints home; in their place, transcribed recollections and portraits of the authors accumulated on the walls — a living archive of the village's spatial history, written by those who had shaped it.
Six Karta-Talks were filmed: the mayor, a farmer, an ecologist, schoolchildren among them. Rather than hold them inside, we projected the recordings from the workshop windows onto the street.
The format was deliberate: not a public hearing, but a slow accumulation of perspectives that passersby could absorb at their own pace.
Discussion evenings asked what casinos do to a village's identity, what cooperatives do for communal life, what a nature reserve is worth when the farmland beside it might simply be left to import. These were not technical questions. They were cultural ones — about values, priorities, and the kind of place Ruggell wants to become.
Schoolchildren built Ruggell in clay — first as it is, then as it could be if twice as many people were to live there well. The models were exhibited alongside the adult discussions, without hierarchy.
What became visible: the greatest resource of a municipality is not its land. It is the people who remember what it once looked like — and can still imagine what it might become.
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