Future History (2022)

Series of horse–drawn carriage tours
30 minutes (max 5 pers.) repeated for one day

Documentation video
6 minutes 44 seconds

The new city Seestadt is located just seven kilometers outside of the city center of Austria's capital Vienna. Construction of this satellite city started in 2014, with about one third of the entire plan realized eight years later. In an attempt to discuss the importance of historical references in public space, which Vienna's historic city center is full of, Willem de Haan brought a horse–drawn carriage from the Vienna's city center to the new city under construction. The touristic mode of transport focuses the attention of its passengers onto the historic characteristics of their surroundings, or in Seestadt's case its possible lack thereof. In stead of explaining the new city, coachman Marco asked his local passengers 'What stories should be included in Seestadt's historical narrative?'.

The tours followed the Sonnenallee (a ring road that crosses the entire city) which at the moment connects the yet empty fields, construction site and inhabited part of the city to each other. These three different landscapes of the new city formed the basis for three chapters in a semi fictional documentation video of the tours. The video runs for about seven minutes, and stars Seestadt's firstborn as one of the narrators. Official screenings of the video will
take place in Seestadt and Vienna's city center in the autumn of 2022.

This project was realized in the framework of a public program by Notgalerie (Seestadt) and Studio Das Weisse Haus (Vienna) that took place in the summer of 2022.