Aus/Sprechen. Ver/Sprechen. Mit/Sprechen   Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Public Program: Act Now!

Following a field research in Trieste, Timothy Nouzak was invited to Museum der Moderne Salzburg as part of the museum’s program on strategies of creative resistance and activism in contemporary art.

Keywords: socially engaged art, artistic autonomy, fieldwork, urban infrastructures, public-space scores, creative resistance

Concept & Performance Timothy Nouzak
Project lead Barbara Holub
Funding: Museum der Moderne Salzburg / “Act Now!”

Exercises & interventions: “staged” attention in everyday space.

Working with pace, visibility, and exposure, the group developed performative scores that temporarily “mis-used” everyday infrastructures: crawling across crosswalks, suspending movement, leaning into walls, and assembling bodies around fences and thresholds. The white coveralls acted as a simple shared costume—simultaneously neutral and conspicuous—so that micro-gestures could register as a form of public address: quiet, precise, and collectively held.

Rather than (over-)producing a single spectacle, the interventions foregrounded the conditions of action: who is allowed to stop, who is seen, what counts as disruption, and how care and risk circulate in public space.

Field Research: infra-structures, utopias & transformations.
Trieste (IT) + Ljubljana (SI), May 2024

Workshop guided by Timothy Nouzak in the context of Barbara Holub's research on interventionist, participatory, and activist artistic practices.

Within the framework of how socially engaged art positions itself in relation to “artistic autonomy”, what conditions shape such projects, and how can they intervene in wider social processes? Through examples and discussions spanning practices since the 1960s (from Allan Kaprow and Suzanne Lacy to Alexandra Pirici), the field research in Porto Vecchio (old harbour in a process of transformation) tested these questions on site—through observation, exercises, and small public-space interventions.