Through the encounter with images from the archives of refugees and Viennese residents a dialogue with various residents of the city is initiated, a dialogue that challenges all the participants and playfully negotiates values, situations and attitudes between similarity and difference. In the performance and installation format mobile stories by Daniel Aschwanden and Conny Zenk, storytelling, performative self-portraits, dances, projections are the media elements of a transdisciplinary practice that aims to bring new impulses to current discourses about issues of integration.

“Every narration celebrates a public anonymity which, through the temporal extension in video and sound, becomes the vivid moment of intimate attention. The superimposition of real stories and videos, coupled with audio material condensed into composition, the archive material from mobile phones and the portrayal of digital data-flows that are not perceptible to the human eye come into the audio-visual installation. Personal data saved in the participants’ smartphones as well as the results of performatively staged discussions are the material for artistic analysis that use deconstruc- tions to explore increasingly fluid identities. A mobile phone can tell stories. What stories can your mobile phone tell? There are collections of images, videos and sounds in chat and social media apps that represent personal descriptions of the users, and formulate identities. Sounds and images form the landscapes of personal memory that are translated into narrated maps. “Key agendas” are the family, occupation, spare time, travel and sudden upheavals that have triggered radical changes in living conditions. But also individual objects, such as tools or a passport, play extraordinary roles. Differences become obvious; what is self-evident for one person may be the absolute object of desire for another. The public portrayal and its attestation by a present collective opens spaces for self-empow- erment, supported as a shared artistic ritual; the work of grieving just as much as the exploration of new social environments.”