A three-dimensional city reveals itself and different media light up in a number of locations. Mental maps, heard images, interviews, data, photos and videos give you an overall sense of the mood in the city. “At the End of the Street” makes it possible to visit different places without being physically present. As a 2.0 tourist you can conduct comprehensive, multidiemensional city research via a game engine. The cities of Tirana and Skopje, both given scant attention, yet very much alive, are presented using participative methods and media chosen by the cities’ inhabitants. These portraits encourage self-reflection and strengthen the sense of “Citizenship.”
At the End of the Street
www.urbanLegend.eu
Amsterdam, Skopje, Tirana, Vienna …
“If your city would be a person, how would he or she look like?” The method of urbanlegend.eu is as simple as formulating question in one city and collecting the answers in another.
For this phase of the project, we focused on the exchange of questions from Amsterdam and Vienna and answers from Skopje as well as Tirana.
Through performance at various places in public space, we were able to film a hundred people asking questions about Skopje and Tirana. We then traveled to Skopje and Tirana in search for answers – and urban legends – by showing the collected video messages to people living in these two cities.
This cross-cultural conversation, presented through a series of video messages, reveals a very unique, subjective, rather personal and contemporary portrait of a city.
With reference to participation, citizenship and empowerment, urbanlegend.eu aims at becoming a community based city exposé for new European cities.”
Thomas Stini lives in Vienna, where he works as a research architect. He studied at the Vienna University of Technology as well as the Tongji Da Xue, Shanghai.
Margot Deerenberg is from Amsterdam, where she studied city geography and visual sociology at the Amsterdam University Graduate School for Social Sciences. She also studied at the Vienna University of Technology.
Stini and Deerenberg are the co-founders of ONORTHODOX, tackling urban issues. Their scientific and artistic projects to date include: Shanghai: wide & close [2007] – Amsterdam: MyPLACE, manipulating meanings [2008-2009] – Istanbul: Eyes on|of Tarlabasi [2010] – Wien: Das sensitive Auge [2010]
