The Linzizzan School of horseback riding over the line
KUNSTUNI LINZ - SPACE AND DESIGN STRATEGIES - COURSE 2025
Signing of the Course constitution: Bastian Lehner, Cecilia Bojanic, Charlotte Vetter, Franciska Dutzler, Gaia Tovaglia, Johann Janko, Katharina Steinbüchler, Margarita Gimaeva, Matteo Locci, Viktoria Hauser, Chuming Yu, Moritz Gregor Böttjer, Xiling Huang, Mina Darvishi, Gabriele Carnio, Matteo Locci
COURSE DESCRIPTION
If there is something common to every pedagogical approach, it is an emphasis on the necessity of investing time to achieve a goal.
Some educational goals simply can’t be achieved if one is not willing to invest time: you can’t learn a language in a day; you can’t become an expert in martial arts at a weekend workshop. Malcolm Gladwell is famously quoted to say that it takes about ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert at anything. Who has 10.000 hours to spare with me?
Likewise at Kunstuni the individual and collective research is limited by time frame. To overcome the structural problem the course will investigate the private sphere.
Within a strict personal consensus/agreement on the amount of private space/time to be dedicated to collective research, the course will flip the regular assumption on public school time frame to infiltrate student’s personal life.
A collective, consensus based, agreement will be the starting ritual for this infiltration.
Once decided, with different takes and desires by each one of the students, the course will start.
Under this light, the class interrogates what it means to navigate the shifting boundaries between public and private spaces in contemporary life. What is its specificity in a design school? For a space strategist?
Caught in two minds, the distinction between public and private spheres in human life grows ever more blurred. Each of us generates a private sphere around ourselves, wherever we may be, yet this sphere is constantly shaped by external stimuli and mass communication. As intimate dimensions become more public and the public dimension faces crises of accessibility and inclusivity, the boundary between these realms feels increasingly fluid.
We will interrogate the fluid and often ambiguous relationship between these spheres, challenging traditional dichotomies and proposing new ways of understanding and acting within them.
Being polysemic, the term public can refer to an undifferentiated group of people, the audience addressed as potentially interested in a specific topic or cultural domain, or it can denote goods and spaces accessible to all. Intuitively, we may think of public spaces as inclusive, accessible places defined by collective sociality and shared civic values. However, the reality is far more complex. Today, public spaces are increasingly fragmented, compartmentalized, and dominated by private interests and profit-driven logic.
“Linzizzan School of horseback riding over the line” invites students to explore these dynamics through the lens of art, micro political actions, and daily life practices. It seeks to reimagine what it means to act politically, creatively, and personally in spaces that defy easy categorization as strictly public or private.
Counterintuitively “Linzizzan School of horseback riding over the line” will work on the importance of bringing the public into the personal with the ultimate goal of expanding the public through the private.
As a radical exertion of the "the personal is political", or beyond if you prefer, we ask how the personal can become a space for concrete and transformative political action. Rather than merely reflecting political principles in private life, this course explores how personal spaces—such as our homes, relationships, or even internal thoughts—can actively become microcosmos of political values.
By recognizing that personal choices and actions can have political significance, we aim to create a dynamic where individual transformation becomes a catalyst for collective change. The course pushes us to consider how the private sphere, often seen as apolitical, can be a site of resistance, reflection, and creative expression that challenges societal norms and promotes justice. In order to do so the course aims at developing a shared set of artistic references, exercises and concepts to navigate the complex interplay between artistic research at the threshold of private and public spaces.
The final aim is to co-create a collective framework that visualizes and connects personal, relational, and public actions and spaces. We will Focus on working together guided by shared values and goals, rather than adhering to uniform ideologies, embracing plurality and individuality within a collaborative action.
MULTI YEAR STUDENTS CO-LED RESEARCHES #2
Emerging Entrances: A Research Project on Public and Private Spaces
We are reimagining the city of Linz by mapping its unofficial passages, the overlooked backdoors, rooftops, cellars, and windows that define how we move through and inhabit public and private spaces. Our goal is to challenge and transform assumptions about where we belong and how we enter spaces.
The research is organized as a monthly collective exploration to build counter-emotional maps of Linz, transforming its public/private assumptions.
We’re not looking for easy answers. We’re questioning the rules.
In order to do so, we will use a magic entrance mat. Carpets are not our subject, but our metaphor. They can stand still or they can fly. Seemingly mundane domestic objects, carpets work as both metaphors and tools; they hide keys, conceal access, and are thresholds within thresholds.
They suggest hidden entrances, welcoming efforts, perhaps secret knowledge, or quiet rebellion.
We ask: Aren’t you glad someone rough is at your door?
Not someone official, expected, but someone disruptive, questioning the right to enter or be denied. Isn´t every door a question mark?
In collaboration with Linz’s dwellers, renters, workers, and passersby, we turn our attention to unofficial passages: backdoors, cellars, rooftops, windows — any portals not meant for public flow, unless opened. We’re interested in testing boundaries: What is considered public or private? How can we reimagine the city’s vertical dimension — not just its streets?
We don’t want passpartouts. Like roughs, we want roughness — entrances for all.
Reclaimed verticality. Alternative evacuation plans: Which roof to climb when the floods come? Which cellar to retreat to when the ground shakes?
We move not just through the city, but through its permissions.
We meet gatekeepers — guards, porters, workers, fence-holders — through misunderstanding and miscommunication. The entrance and the story of convincement are part of our research; we produce soft conflict, productive confusion, and unexpected permission.
This is a study in architecture as a social signal — how space whispers “come in” or “stay out.” We want to make that language visible.We want to test it. And sometimes, we misread it on purpose.
Which roof should we climb when the flood comes? Which backdoor shall we use when the earth shakes? What window can we use in case of emergency? What keller can we disclose?
Open your door and join us: We collaborate with Linz’s dwellers, workers, renters, and passersby to create a collective experience of the city. Let’s break down the invisible barriers that divide us — together, we’ll map new ways to enter, reclaim, and understand the city.
MULTI YEAR STUDENTS CO-LED RESEARCHES #1
Gut Feelings: a Collaborative Glossary of Going Beyond Oneself
Over the course of three years, The Linzizzan School of Horseback Riding Over the Line invites the department into a series of immersive gatherings where the dinner table becomes a site of performative and collaborative experimentation. These are not dinners in any traditional sense. They are laboratories. They are stages. They are temporary zones of transformation. Conviviality here is not an end in itself but a method—a shared language for undoing the familiar and exploring what happens when we step beyond ourselves.
Each gathering focuses on a single expression, a concept or word that opens up a field of inquiry: from mirroring to ecstasy, from the uncanny to sensory deprivation. Through cooking, eating, reading, writing, and embodied practices, we collectively explore ways of losing, shifting, or expanding identity.
Twice per semester, we co-lead these cooking laboratories as spaces to meet opposites, confront differences, and create together. Topics, formats and words are subject to change according to end of the semester feedbacks.
