A billboard by Oliver Ressler
4 x 4 m, 2015
This large-size billboard initiates a dialogue between the dark past of Morzinplatz in Vienna on the one hand and the inhumanity inherent in the EU’s politics of exclusion on the other hand.
The upper half of the poster shows the housing estate Leopold-Figl-Hof, while a reflection in the water depicts Hotel Metropole, which once stood in this spot. In 1938, the hotel was seized by the National Socialists and converted into the Gestapo headquarters. In the framework of the National Socialist combat against their enemies, interrogations with horrifying tortures took place here. Usually, psychological methods were first used to make the accused yield the desired information. If this seemed impossible to attain, the Gestapo officers used more intense means of interrogation, which included life-threatening methods of torture, such as submerging persons underwater until near-drowning.
Photography: Oliver Ressler
Historical photography: Wien Museum Fotoarchiv
Photomontage: Jörg Auzinger
The billboard was carried out in the framework of “Hotel Metropole. Giving Memory a Future”, Into the City/Wiener Festwochen, Vienna, 2015