CIA / Community in Arbeit  is an intervention in the public/social space on the topic of “Working on a Community.” The field of “Community Work” was explored between September and November 2012 in the Sandleiten neighborhood of Ottakring in Vienna in a cooperative approach with artistic and scientific points of view using different rendering formats (photography, graphics, text, interviews, discussion).
By integrating participants on site the project research, interviews and their visual realization are meant to contribute to encouraging reflection on various aspects of community work in Sandleiten. The results of CIA / Community in Arbeit were continuously presented in poster form on location. Residents, and interested persons were also invited to make comments, suggestions and formulate wishes. Blank posters were available and the “World Café” discourse evening (interdisciplinary method for the generation of collective knowledge) was conceived to get to know each other and to exchange and formulate aims.

Our interest lay in the community work done in the housing project and its surroundings, whether it be paid (e.g. facility caretaking) or unpaid (voluntary activities), public-community work (e.g. Wiener Wohnen, kindergarten), or a private business (e.g. hairdresser communication work), political or explicitly apolitical (e.g. (recreational groups) and others.
We use the term “Community Work” in the sense of working on and for the community. The community is understood to be the “general public” in the Sandleiten complex its surroundings, and its infrastructure. This “public community of the Sandleiten residents consists of people with very different relationships to their residential area (which is generally the case in urban spaces), beginning with the residents that grew up in Sandleiten and have a strong connection to the location, to those whose social life is centered around a different part of town, or those who have just recently moved into the neighborhood¹.
We recorded an impression of the moment with a mixture of social science and artistic, image oriented research, renderings and presentations to create a portrait of the current public life in and around the Sandleiten housing project.
CIA / Community in Arbeit does not claim to be complete. Instead, it tries to reveal a few fundamental approaches and considerations on the subject of “Community Work.”
We were interested in the motives that guide the different community work variants, the underlying structures that make community work possible, or impossible, as well as the effects on the quality of the communities on site, especially on public life in this housing project and its environs.

Project Management / Photography: Wolfgang Schneider (Artist), Beatrix Zobl (Artist)
Interviews: Hubert Eichmann (Social Scientists/ FORBA – Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt/Working World Research and Counseling Center ), Helene Schneider (Student, Cultural Studies and Social Anthropology)
Graphics: Caterina Krüger

partner/innen. Verein für öffentliche Kunst
(Partners. Public Art Association)
Theodor-Storm-Weg 21
1160 Vienna
T: +43 699 1924 79 42 (Wolfgang Schneider)
contact[at]zoblschneider.net
www.zoblschneider.net
 
In collaboration with:
 
Forschungs- und Beratungsstelle Arbeitswelt, Wien (FORBA)
(Working Life Research Centre, Vienna)
Hubert Eichmann und Helene Schneider
Aspernbrückengasse 4/5
1020 Vienna
T: 43 1 212 4700-61 (Hubert Eichmann)
eichmann[at]forba.at
www.forba.at
 
In the framework of the project
''Empowerment in artistic and social scientific work practices“:
http://www.wwtf.at/projects/research_projects/details/index.php?PKEY=1053_DE_O


 

Photo: Zobl Schneider

Impressum

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