• ◯ Intro

Infos

Intro

Over a period of three months, during a scholarship program for art photography, Susanne Miggitsch traveled through London mainly by bus. She meticulously recorded on paper, pen in hand, the conversations and noises in the background, the announcements by the bus driver, and so forth. Since her focus was on the loudest sound, sometimes meaning tended to dissipate, and the word liberated itself from syntax.

This project resulted in a book called Heating up the seat, published by Mark Pezinger Books (Vienna, AT), which is a dense web of texts shifting between documentation and poetry. It reflects Miggitsch’s attempt to hold onto something ephemeral in her artistic practice. What counts here is each moment’s bodily experience. A yearning to bring the moment to life is already apparent upon opening the book, for one or more voices.

In the conversation with Lina Morawetz, the artistic strategies employed and the documentary-textual approach to Heating up the seat will be illuminated in more detail on this evening.

Susanne Miggitsch (lives and works in Vienna, AT) delves into diverse approaches revolving around documentation. She researches the relations between the media image, physical space, and the body. Moreover, she incorporates the mediatic qualities of film and photography as figures of thought in her working process, to analyze and critically question the mechanisms of perception. Her work is further characterized by her interdisciplinary approach; it connects aspects from literature and filmic media with performative exploratory questions. Situative action is often the main focus, and the urban context frequently becomes a space of agency for everyday observations. Miggitsch studied under Friedl Kubelka at the School for Artistic Photography, Vienna, and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has received various scholarships and awards for her work.

Lina Morawetz lives and works as a writer and translator in Vienna (AT). Her most recent writing includes the stories “Tag am Meer” (Podium, 2023) and “Groß- und Kleinbuchstaben” (Sonderzahl, 2021), as well as essays for the artist Mirjam Reiter (EIKON no. 126, 2024) and for the artist’s book Nebenan by Sebastian Stumpf (Steidl 2022). She has been on research trips to Mexico, Russia, Israel, and Hungary. Her work has been distinguished by accolades such as the Annual Scholarship for Literature of the Province of Salzburg (2021) and the Edit Essay Prize (2013, honorable mention). Morawetz studied aural and visual cultures under Kodwo Eshun and Mark Fisher at Goldsmiths, University of London (GB), and literary writing at the Leipzig Institute of German Literature (DE). She is currently teaching experimental writing at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.