Site Complexes: Responsive Practices for the 21st Century
The project was developed by Prof. Dr. Sebastian Egenhofer (Art History, University of Vienna), Prof. Dr. Susanne Hauser (Art History and Cultural Studies, UdK Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Stefan Neuner (Art History and Theory, UdK Berlin). Postdoc-positions are held by Dr. Christoph Chwatal (Vienna) and Dr. Ludovica Tomarchio (UdK Berlin). The project is funded by the Nomis Foundation, Zurich.
Aims:
Today’s world faces overlapping crises—climate, migration, technological upheaval, polarized publics. At ground level, these forces interact and mutate within specific sites, creating problems no single discipline or solution can resolve. Too often, art, architecture, politics, and technology respond with fragmented, specialized interventions that miss this essential overlap. Our project confronts this structural complexity by focusing on responsive practices in art and architecture. Responsiveness—deliberately rhyming with responsibility—signals not mere adaptation but active recognition of accountability, agency, and the power to intervene in future processes.
Concept:
Central to our inquiry is the concept of the site complex. Unlike Place—which in architectural theory often implies stability, identity, and centering, and is itself contested—the term Site, rooted in art discourse, provides a more progressive and critical analytic. Site, as we use it, foregrounds dynamic relations—material, political, infrastructural—that shape experience and open spaces to contestation, transformation, and new forms of identification and connectivity. Historically, the emergence of site-specificity in art and architecture since the 1970s marked a rupture with the universalist, top-down principles of modernism. Artists and architects began to engage local materials, contested histories, and situational logics—often unsettling structures of power, tradition, and technological process. In parallel, anthropology and environmental theory unfolded paradigms of interdependence and feedback, making “site” more than a geographic point: an entangled, unstable constellation.
We build on this heritage to propose a new concept: site complexes as researchable, actionable units. Rather than mapping over-complex wholes from above, we take a bottom-up approach: studying how practices of art and architecture operate within—and actively negotiate—the layered structure of contemporary sites. Our analysis tracks and typifies recurrent operations—procedural moves such as exposing, mediating, recalibrating—through which practitioners generate sustainable and responsible change.