Press Conference 18th December 2007
Presentation of the LINZ BOOKTuesday, 18th December 2007, 10:30 AM
Café Traxlmayr
Promenade 16, 4020 Linz, Austria
This is no run-of-the-mill guide book and—although lavishly illustrated—it isn’t a typical coffee-table picture collection either. Instead, it’s an anthology of stories and essays, critical analyses of Linz, and declarations of love for this city. Thus, over the course of 130 pages, the LINZ BOOK takes intense, candid, and unconventional glimpses at the city that will be Europe’s 2009 Capital of Culture. The facets of Linz that these texts describe are highly diverse and often quite surprising.
The same can be said of the 58 photographs taken in Linz by Paul Kranzler. They are unconventional visual motifs that make those perusing them—locals and visitors alike—take a second or even third look at details of the cityscape.
The diverse array of 19 contributors that Linz09 lined up for the LINZ BOOK includes an author and a journalist, students and immigrants, scholars and a museum director. The texts they’ve composed describe what Linz means to them personally, and how they regard the city, its suburbs and the inhabitants of this region. With all the positive and negative facets this entails.
Aileen Derieg is a translator who lives in Linz. Her essay deals with the descriptive epithets that have long been attached to this place: steel city and blue-collar town as well as city of culture. In “From (Next to) Nothing,” Derieg assesses the successful makeover the city’s image has undergone in recent years.
Professor Herbert Lachmayer of Linz Art University also considers the city’s globalization-driven transformation in “My One and Global Linz,” while Christine Schöpf, head of the cultural department at the ORF – Austrian Broadcasting Company’s Upper Austria Regional Studio, writes that she still dreams of Linz as Digital City at the nexus of technology, art, society and (digital) media.
Another approach to the subject of transformation in Linz is taken by Niko Wahl, historian and Linz09 project developer, who looks back on the city’s past: its early reputation as a commercial center and how it reverted to “its former, more staid existence as an industrial town.” Then in the mid-19th century, new forms of transportation “finally drew Linz into the orbit of the modern world.” Wahl describes Linz as a city in which the historical turning points can still be felt today—the Hauptplatz (Main Square) continuing to reflect its history, and its current prosperity the upshot of economic and structural changes in Europe.
Siegfried Kristöfl, a cultural manager at Kremsegg Castle, also has a historical narrative to relate—“An Upper Austrian Family History” to be precise. This is the story of the relationship between the city and the surrounding countryside, one about Linz and its position as Upper Austria’s urban center. In elaborations conceived in even more sweeping dimensions, Martin Fritz, director of the Festival of the Regions, sees Linz “at the center of the central region,” as the metropolis that provides its region with the necessary infrastructure, as “a hub and turntable within a larger area … extending almost to the Alps in the south and southwest and to the Czech border in the north and northeast.” Fritz’s account portrays Linz’s diverse interrelationships with its extended metropolitan area and surrounding communities and, in so doing, defines Linz as a destination in the mobility-driven world that is the setting of our everyday lives.
Whereas Fritz emphasizes the network of linkages connecting Linz to the surrounding region, Erhard Gstöttner, editor at a leading local daily newspaper, sees Linz as “the city of islands” divided into a multiplicity of sections. In his essay, the journalist critically scrutinizes the social differences that distinguish Kleinmünchen with its working-class textile industry population, lower middle-class Ebelsberg, Franckviertel, the city’s traditional blue-collar neighborhood, as well as Urfahr, Bindermichl and Spallerhof.
But the authors haven’t just produced critical takes on the individual neighborhoods that make up Linz. Mario Terzic, professor at Vienna’s University of Applied Art, enthuses in the LINZ BOOK about Lustenau, the site of steel mills and chemical plants, a part of town he lovingly dubs “Lustau” (literally: pleasure meadow). He interprets Lustenau as an “expansive, mosaicised industrial garden, shot through with functions urban and rural, and transformed into a compound entity of industrial democracy and rustic idyll.”
Ulrich Fuchs, deputy artistic director of Linz09, points out some of the city’s other strong points. His acquaintance with Linz has blossomed into enchantment. He is particularly struck by the importance of politics here; what Fuchs especially likes, though, is the pleasant unpretentiousness of the people of Linz. As a German football fan, he has also developed a growing attachment to the home team, LASK. Likewise tough to beat are the culinary delights of Upper Austria’s capital city—in Ulrich Fuchs’ words: “Linz is where we should be …” And if for no other reason than because “Linz is more beautiful than Salzburg” according to the polemic cultural comparison penned by Dietmar Steiner, director of Az W–Architecture Center Vienna. He sees Linz as “more receptive … in its architecture, the golden mean, as it were, of European normalcy.”
Both Ike Okafor, co-founder and chairman of the Black Community, and Marieta Riedl, head of the Intercultural Section of the Upper Austrian Greens and co-founder of Linz’s first Bulgarian private school, came “to Linz via detours.” Their accounts are of a Linz that seems to have become more international, more multi-cultural, more open. They describe problematic issues and their own personal confrontations with them when they first arrived in town. Today, Ike Okafor even dreams of being mayor of Linz some day.
In addition to culture, industry and nature, Linz has also brought forth great names and outstanding personalities. Peter Androsch, composer and Linz09’s musical director, sings the praises of one of them, composer Anton Bruckner, voicing his conviction that “Bruckner is a giant.” Martin Sturm, director of the O.K Center for Contemporary Art, on the other hand, dedicates “a collage” to author Adalbert Stifter in his contribution to the LINZ BUCH.
And what would Linz be without the Danube? Hubert von Goisern, founding father of Alpine Rock and roving ambassador of Linz09, comes out as one of the river’s greatest fans. In his concert tour logbook—a work featuring a plot that is as fascinating as its entries are beautifully written—he pours forth his passion for the “mother of all European rivers” that is “headstrong and unpredictable and will impose its will on its bedfellows.”
The LINZ BOOK is being published with a print run of 25,000 copies in German and 5,000 in English. During the days leading up to Christmas, copies will be made available free of charge at the Hauptbahnhof (Main Train Station), Wissensturm, Bürgerservice in the Neues Rathaus, Tourist Information Bureau in the Altes Rathaus as well as in the Lentos Museum of Art and the Design Center. Linz09 will also provide information online at www.linz09.at about the locations at which you can pick up your free copy of the LINZ BOOK.
You can also download the LINZ BOOK here from our website. Or order a hardcopy here
