Finissage: Geography of Ghosts

Artists: Wanda Spahl & Dominic Schwab

June 23, 17:30 Guided Tour (English)*
The social scientist Wanda Spahl will discuss spatial and material aspects of refugee health: How do hospitals produce belonging? What does an X-ray image show? Do we live here and there at the same time? Everyone is welcome. Please register until June 21 at: wanda.spahl@gmail.com

June 23, 19:00 Closing

GEOGRAPHY OF GHOSTS is a collaboration between the social scientist Wanda Spahl and the architect Dominic Schwab. Based on five years of research on refugee health in Austria, the exhibition attends to the in/visibility of refugees in the healthcare system, societal discourse and public space. It inverts the intricate relationship between medical imaging techniques and “objective” representations of disease, by staging spatial aspects of health and illness. Interweaving the lucid, spectral and inconsistent materiality of 3D scanning technologies with spoken stories, political statements and conceptual thoughts, the exhibition unfolds a landscape of spatial narratives.

GEOGRAPHY OF GHOSTS was developed in the course of a research-art residency in 2022/23, thanks to the support of mLAB, Institute of Geography, University of Bern.

Artists:
Wanda Spahl is a social scientist. From 2018 to 2022, she was a university assistant at the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCoS), Department of Political Science, University of Vienna. She has published on health and forced migration a.o. in Bioethics, Comparative Migration Studies, Future.lab Magazin & EASST Review.

Dominic Schwab is an architect, teacher and researcher based in Vienna. He is a faculty member at studio3./, Institute for Experimental Architecture, University of Innsbruck. He is co-founder of the Vienna Architecture Summer School and SOAP, some online architecture practice.