Wanda Spahl
Dominic Schwab
20 min Presentation + 20 min Discussion
Olavshallen: Lille sal
Geography of Ghosts is a collaboration between the social scientist Wanda Spahl and the new media artist/architect Dominic Schwab. The project discusses social-science research about forced migration and health in Vienna, Austria, in a hybrid media geography. The output is a narrative landscape of (psycho-)geographies and personal maps that unfold refugees’ and healthcare practitioners’ experiences. Visual data from digital technologies (3D LIDAR scanning, photogrammetry, and open source GIS data) is combined with personal stories, political statements, and conceptual thoughts. The project attends to the in/visibility of refugees in the public (healthcare system), to their place in liminal space, and ultimately to the digital experience of these things through the lucid, spectral, and inconsistent documentation of spaces and materialities by the artistic use of digital technologies. The proposed contemporary practice of mapping spatial and social territory in healthcare also aims to shed light on these technologies’ epistemological potential as an integral part of research activities.
Wanda Spahl
Wanda Spahl is a PhD student at the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences. She is co-leader of the qualitative research project "Solidarity in Times of a Pandemic". From 2018 to 2022, she was a university assistant at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna.
Dominic Schwab
Dominic Schwab is an architect, teacher and researcher based in Vienna, Austria. He holds a master degree in art and architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is a faculty member at the ./studio3, Institute for Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck. Currently he is pursuing a PhD with a research focus on the spectralities of media-technologies and how they inform a spatial design practice that reflects on architecture in the age of archives.