Linz: A Guide to Europe’s 2009 Capital of Culture

Linz, the third-largest city in Austria, is the European Capital of Culture in 2009. It’s no wonder the city is gearing up for the occasion with new cultural centres, a year-long program of events, and big big spending on the arts. And that – spending on the arts – is always a reason to celebrate in my book!

Linz09 Art Preview

I’m just back from my first visit to Linz. I arrived on the Danube River with the media art pirates of European Sound Delta in time to coincide with Ars Electronica. It’s one of the longest-running electronic arts festivals in Europe, celebrating 20 years with the theme ‘A New Cultural Economy’.

We docked at the Nibelungenbrucke in a magnificent location, central to the old town and all the festival action: a block from the Roter Kreb after-party bar, and across the river from the new Ars Electronica Centre, a building whose lines and form hold architectural echoes of a ship. This and the Linz09 info centre are housed in the building of the former Tax Office East in Hauptplatz.

Inside the Lentos Kunstmuseum

The first port of call is the basement of Lentos Kunstmuseum, to visit friends who are setting up for their exhibition Ecology of the Techno Mind, curated by Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana. The building is a mysterious hulking mass on the river: a black oblong by day, it reveals a frivolous side in the evening when the entire black panelled exterior is lit up with a beautiful vibrant hot-pink glow. The exhibition is the featured art scene at this years Ars Electronica.

Zero G art by Dragan Zivadinov

I’m fascinated by Dragan Zivadinov’s gravity-free theatre project, Noordung Zero Gravity Biomechanical, created in an Ilyushin 76 aircraft at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training centre in Star City, outside Moscow. The work ‘Orbital Orientation Object’ is shown here as a series of video screens in a space-age sculptural frame, watched in turn by a surveillance camera on motorised wheels circling over your head.

I had never wanted to travel in space, but seeing this work changed my mind. Slovenia is running the worlds first artist-in-space program, and having gone through full training, Dragan is a likely candidate.

The work of BridA Art Collective, Modux 3.4, is also intriguing — it has a topographical map read by a camera on casters, and a GPS locator that travels over a backlit translucent surface, setting off sounds along the points it touches. This gives an unusual sense of place, distance and connection between physical landscape and aural imagination, evoking a different sense of travel.

Art from the BridA Art Collective

Then there’s the latest manifestation of Slovene media artist Marko Peljhan, who has spent many years travelling the world with the MakroLab project. If you haven’t heard, it’s an “autonomous media zone living unit” that can sustain four people for 120 days in conditions of blissful isolation. It’s been installed everywhere from Iceland to the Scottish Highlands and the South Pole.

The new work, ‘You are the Infrastructure’, develops a global network to create a communication of the future, and plans to set up 16 international nodes for transmitting and receiving signals, messages and information through this human infrastructure. Imagine sending email by morse code through a secret channel in a custom-built radio tower, and you get the idea.

Upstairs in the regular exhibition space of the museum is a wonderful exhibition of painter Oskar Kokoschka, ‘A vagabond in Linz’, who mixed portraits of Viennese celebrities with scenes of decadent bohemian life.

At the far end of the upstairs gallery, I stumbled into one of the most relaxing places I have found in any museum, an empty room with green cushions along floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the river, where you can lounge in the sun. The Lentos Kunstmuseum cafe also provides one of the most decadent breakfast experiences I’ve had in a long time (…a glass of prosecco, a tempting array of jams, honey, chocolate, cheese, fruit and muesli).

Other things to do & see in Linz

The circular building next to the river is the Brucknerhaus, the city concert hall, usually home to classical music and theatre performances. Every year it is taken over for a few days by the media artists, curators and theorists who attend Ars Electronica, to soak in the dazzling array of creative uses and abuses for technology, however the regular program offers a rich mix of voices, salons and multicultural ensembles.

O.K. Center in Linz

The evening crowd is a lot more relaxed at Roter Krebes (Red Crab), a student bar hosting after-parties each night (with a mermaid thermin player and resonating string musician in the lounge upstairs). It’s a cosy place to chill out and meet people, the experimental music program goes all year.

You can also take the Bus 50 from the Hauptplatz up the mountain to the Pöstlingberg church, perched high on the mountain overlooking Linz, with gorgeous views from the many terraces plus a fairy-tale underground cave and the Linz zoo halfway up. (The mountain tram is due to re-open in 2009.) Or wander through the maze of picturesque buildings, along to the O.K. Centre for Contemporary Art (Offenes Kulturhaus), a publicly funded ‘experimental laboratory for exploring art’.

If you’re looking for a slightly more alternative take on what’s happening, head out to the Time’s Up ‘Laboratory for the Construction of Experimental Situations’, a punk-ish warehouse space in the industrial docks. It hosts an artistic program including exhibitions, workshops, live music and other events.

The Danube Rave is a yearly international electronic-dance music festival, held at the Posthof. It has an impressive line-up from rock, blues to dub/hiphop/electro, metal, flamenco and urban gypsy music gigs. The Sound Kitch’n and Stadtwerkstatt also provide acess to local and international alternative music scenes. Finish your Linz experience with an afternoon expedition to the eco-friendly Solar City.

Are you getting a better handle on why Linz is the European Capital of Culture in 2009? There’s plenty here to get you cultured up.

-Jodi Rose

Planning a trip? Browse Viator’s things to do in Austria, tours in Vienna (including plenty of music and culture options) and Salzburg sightseeing tours. If you need a place to stay, check out Linz Hotels on Planetware.com.