www.lomography.com/ViennaIs

Vindobona/Vindomina/Wenia… Vienna: 2000 years of visible growth and development. And still going strong. Examples of every phase of redevelopment & expansion going back two millennia are still visible around Vienna today. In fact, Vienna is a textbook example of a city that has preserved visible signs of all the various layers of expansion and change going way back. From Roman mini-settlement to trendy court life, from rented beds in cramped overcrowded barracks to the new skyscrapers on the periphery for the 21st century.

At the time of the Ancient Romans Vienna was heavily influenced by Rome, in the middle-ages it had elements of Prague, and Italy during the Renaissance. Then came the Baroque and Rococo phases where the focus moved from Italy to France, and the Jugendstil stuff has its echoes as far afield as Brussels, Chicago, or Singapore. The Romans, the Turks (who left their coffee behind) and a wild mix of Austro-Hungarian subjects all wanted to make Vienna their home. Then with the industrialisation came waves of workers from all over the then vast Austrian Empire, and following the failed revolutionary overtones of 1848 a new era, the Gründerzeit, began. There was a sudden influx of managers, engineers, builders, architects, trades people and bankers (the people who make cities), Jews and Calvinists, Brits, Italians, Greeks, Danes, Swiss and Germans. All of whom did their bit to make this city the Fin-de-Siecle cosmopolitan metropolis it then became. And then following the second war Vienna was the residence of Russians, Americans, the French and the Brits, the UN and OPEC, and now little Austria is part of a vast and expanding European Union – and home to cultures and influences as contrasting as those found in Beirut or Reykjavik.

So Vienna is a city that has always interacted with the social groupings of the world and their lifestyles and history, the people here and coming here have always lived with a rich diversity of cultures. And, in turn, the various phases of influx have been enmeshed in both the development of the city as well as events all over the world.

For the Vienna Architecture Year 2005 and in collaboration with the City of Vienna (www.wienarchitektur.at), we would like to invite you to participate in a project that celebrates the architecture behind the plethora of lifestyles in the city. Local residents, their visitors and people from all over the world who associate a history with Vienna that goes well beyond the borders of Austria are invited to pursue their own perspective in true Lomographic manner and with the images to match.

What makes you curious? We want to see your stories and visions of urban space and its architecture. Analyse, if you will, the surface and the movement that forms the background to the city. The skin, the pulse, the escapades and the stuff that works for you, the structure and the expression of yearnings, the beautiful and the ugly, the rude and the sophisticated, the clarity and the dirt, the communicative moments and the restrictions, the familiar and the stage-managed… Capture the urban space, city life and urban development of Vienna today on Lomographs. The Lomographic range-finder here is not set on criticism or design, but on a review instilled with plenty of good ol' fashioned imagination. Send us an imaginative stock-take of the background to city life: its architecture.

From a Lomographic viewpoint, the best way to do this is to look at things in their international context. Pick up the threads that lead here and find the common ground with places all over the world. What we propose is that you imagine Vienna as a different city in Vienna; and in other cities, to find the images that awaken your associations with Vienna. What if Vienna was Istanbul? What features could have symbolic value, which influences would be wonderful, what do the facades of the buildings look like that conceal social niches, and which streets would be an altogether different colour? Or, where is Chicago like Vienna? Where can you notice the historic and everyday cultural borders in specific details or in the more swanky big scale stuff, and where do these borders blend?

Vienna is yesterday and tomorrow, but today. An experiment. We are looking forward in anticipation to your Lomographic chronicle of your Vienna, the manifestations of how you experience the city on the Danube. And, wherever you are on the planet, we're also looking forward to seeing the bits of your hometown that are Vienna for you.

The collective work, the ViennaIs Statement from all participants worldwide is to be presented both in the online gallery (www.lomography.com/ViennaIs) as well as in a major exhibition at the City of Vienna Wiener Planungswerkstatt gallery from November 2005 to January 2006 (latest details with regular updates at www.lomography.com/events).

The competition starts NOW, Lomographic cameras are available to borrow from the Lomography Shop Vienna in the Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsquartier (Monday to Sunday, 11am - 7pm). Deadline for submissions (upload or send pictures) is October 16, 2005!

As always, the most Lomographic, daring and beautiful images will be showered with excellent prizes: two-way flights away from and BACK to Vienna, or to Vienna and back wherever, as well as a whole sack full of Lomographic cameras are waiting for you.

Contact: Amira Bibawy amira@lomography.com

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