FOOD
A Sculpture Symposium
The artistic project M is conceived as a contemporary sculpture symposium in the summer semester of 2026 and takes place in cooperation with [kunstwerk] Krastal, among other locations in the marble quarry of the company Lauster in Carinthia. At its core lies collective work with a material that demands cooperation. Working with marble inevitably transcends the individual and requires communal action. Sculpture is understood here as a social practice in which cooperation and collective responsibility inscribe themselves into the process of form-finding.
From this logic, a collective kitchen sculpture made of marble is to emerge: a functional infrastructure with artistic ambition, a social sculpture that is not representative but meant to be used. Cooking and eating are therefore not atmospheric additions or promises of comfort, but an integral part of the course. The kitchen functions as necessary infrastructure for community as well as a working platform, a place of assembly and reflection – a pedestal for conversation. It is both stage and tool: for negotiations, conflicts, collective decisions, and reflection on one’s own role within this system.
This kitchen is political because it presupposes nothing. It offers no comfort, but rather a structure in which work, responsibility, and decision-making are shared. Between marble and meal, the question of how community functions is negotiated – beyond efficiency, visibility, and self-staging. In the tradition of sculpture symposia and in reference to social artistic practices such as FOOD, the restaurant initiated by Gordon Matta-Clark as a collective working and meeting space, shared eating is understood as a spatial practice. One’s own action is to be reconsidered situationally, vulnerably, and again and again within its social context.
The course explicitly understands itself as an analogue experiential space. Digital distribution logics, permanent visibility, and media self-assurance recede into the background. Instead, an experimental space emerges in the sense of openness: for exploring one’s own standpoint within the collective, for doubt, friction, and productive uncertainty. The goal is not an autonomous individual work, but a functioning social sculpture made of Krastal marble, shaped and activated through collective action. At the end of the semester, the project FOOD is to be activated as a material and social sculpture in Courtyard 1 of the TU main building and presented to the public.
Lehrende