Reading Masculinity

Reading Masculinity: Tactics of Presence

2024 • Public intervention
Single-channel video, 1:33

Exhibition
Vitruvius from Without, Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt

For one month, I returned daily to Neuer Platz, a civic square dominated by the City Hall and the Lindwurm fountain, where the figure of Hercules stages masculine heroism at the symbolic center of the city, to perform a quiet act of reading.

Standing before the fountain, I inserted duration, softness, and repetition into a space organized around permanence, monumentality, and civic order. The intervention unfolded within the ordinary rhythms of the square, at times intersecting with flea markets, festivals, guided tours, and everyday pedestrian movement.

Documented by the city’s webcam, the action entered an automated municipal image archive. The work uses this unintentional record to ask how civic architecture choreographs behavior, how public space absorbs or resists minor disruptions, and how a body can temporarily re-inscribe a monumental setting through repeated presence.