I’ve often wondered what it is about Vienna that makes it one of my favourite cities in the world. I have this blood rush-blood gush feeling within me whenever I’m en route to there. Perhaps it’s because I am privileged to have a sense of continuity from my first visit in 2018, when I happened to meet an artist named Marlene Hausegger at Parallel, an alternative contemporary art fair that takes place alongside the main Vienna Art Fair. She happened to be preparing for an upcoming residency in India and we bonded so organically. Ever since, her gorgeous top-floor apartment in the third district has become my default home whenever I’m in the Austrian capital. She remains, somehow, for me a witness, someone I met right on the cusp of my return to South Tyrol in 2018 in order to meet with my partner, with whom, at the time, I’d had an intense long-distance flirtation. We were meant to spend some time together to explore the contours of the intimacy we had been evolving since we had first met. My relationship with Marlene has progressed parallel to my involvement with my partner. She and I have watched each other transform over the last three years. I would be seeing her in Vienna this time for the first time since I moved to Italy in June last year, so the anticipation of arriving from Graz was so much more compounded.

I often love to claim that if I were offered a choice between living in Berlin and living in Vienna, I would choose Vienna hands-down. It is the more unpopular choice, given Berlin’s reputation as a contemporary arts hub, and a nest for a diverse range of artistic practices. I like Berlin, but I love Vienna, in some inexplicable way that isn’t logical or cannot be rationalised. Maybe I like who I am when I am there, or how the city has this political edge, and a feminist history that excites me. Or something about the people I know there, who excite me with their imaginations and their warmth. It could also be the extent of my interactions there with art itself, the kind of interventions I have experienced there that my skin remembers. There are certain rituals that I seem, inadvertently, to perform when I’m there, like visiting the Theseus Temple in Volksgarten, to see what installation they have at that moment. This time there was an immersive labyrinth installed by Susanna Fritscher, an Austrian artist, made of porous silicon-threaded ceiling-to-floor walls that seemed harp-like in their construction and whose basic pattern mirrored the temple’s neo-classical interior. It was wonderful to walk through and experience the illusion of the structure moving with your body as you sought the way forward and back, and to arrive at the opposite end of the entrance and look back and see the world outside differently than when you came in.