VWW: Gmpdfr - A walk along the Wiener creative Scene

This is a storytelling experiment, looking at the most creative street in Austria.

Join us for a walk exploring the interplay between location, culture and the new world of work. Gumpendorferstrasse is full of groups who interact with each other. We want to celebrate this transdisciplinary flow, and hear from various players along the street, about what it means to them to be near to others who work in related, but different, cultural sectors.

We originally developed this tour to celebrate the 25^th birthday of Kulturkonzepte - who live at No. 9 - and it marked the 100th Jane's Walk in Vienna. We repeated it in summer 2019, for Wien Museum & Creative Mornings. We will visit sites (street art, a cafe, university, digital pioneers, musicians, perfume-makers and a rooftop) to hear stories about how the arts and innovation are developing. What are the challenges, and which new solutions are they finding?

Gumpendorferstrasse runs west from the centre of our city out to the Gürtel, through the heart of Mariahilf. It is not beautiful at first sight, but has lots of fascinating details which we will explore. It has good streetlife and a young, dynamic population. Our focus is on culture, but in a looser sense of that word. You will hear insider details, secrets, and surprises. The tour is about the spirit of the street, and its psychogeography. We like very much that the road has a hill in the middle, and that it has different moods heading west, and between day and night.

For those unfamiliar with psychogeography, Guy Debord developed it in the 1950s, as part of Situationism. Life is a playground, and he wanted to resist conventional structures by wandering through the city, led by desires. These drifts were known as derives, and could last for days, ideally under the influence of alcohol/drugs. They valued a more playful approach to life. So this is an invitation to gamify your life.

We want to build new networks and dialogue, and so at the end, we collect in a gemütlich cafe for good coffee and cakes.

Walk leader: Eugene Quinn

Part of Vienna Walking Week, our attempt to rethink tourism.