Underground City 21 Vienna (2009 – 2011) was developed to record snapshots, utopias and potentials in real and imaginary urban networks and to manifest their structures of communication and activities in installative and performative sculptures. The idea of public space, in all its sociocultural and political dimensions, as well as the imaginative borderlines between upper and under ground was discussed as part of a process of discourse within the fields of art. Collaborative ideas and subjective creations, micro-nations as social circles, were, placed as fragments, on various kinds of “stage”. By doing this, a contextual sphere for a real time-simulation, of an Underground City in the 21st century, was created, which at the same time can be seen as a contemporary form of theater. Taking up the parameters of the geographical, physical and historical threads of the real starting point of the project in the ex-coal-mine in Labin / Croatia, a temporary sculpture of UNDERGROUND CITY 21 could be created by all participating people living in the area or being attracted by the utopian topic, as artists, theoreticians, spectators and supporters. Every participant became an inhabitant of temporary
Underground City 21.

By building an invisible Underground City structure with real people and creating physical communities in geographically existing, real spaces, we established a physical sculpture, at the same time establishing a tangible image of current code- and cipher- systems of navigation and communication. This experimental setup also visualized the overlaying structures and “tools” of physical and digital web-communication strings. Thus installing an “ideal” city in the sense of its idea being a virtual construction carried on by the imagination of a temporary community and performing its “nervous system” and its architecture without any emanation of physical architecture, transportation system or equal.

Combining a practical experiment with theoretical discourse in an artistic platform by involving the audience and the people of the neighborhood as participants allowed to create a virtual form of sculpture and a contemporary form of theater providing / ensuring a social process of communication. Thus, we established an activity- and communication platform for artists and audience at the same time. The audience is not just the witness but also producing part
of the simulation, which made the whole process a real developing process of an invisible, but still describable contemporary city.

UC21 was realized in the international cooperation of NOMAD (AUT), L.A.E Labin Art Express XXI (CRO), L.I.B.A.T. (FRA) and Prague College (CZ) and in local cooperation with Open Space, Theater Nestroyhof, Hamakom and Fluc in Vienna.