Hans Schabus – Monument for People on the Move, 2024

Hans Schabus’s sculptural and architectural installations are the result of a highly personal connection with exhibition spaces and their context. He explores the relationship between his artworks and the surrounding environments by using unexpected materials or making the most of unlikely circumstances. Through radical activities like hollowing out, filling in, banding and cutting, Hans Schabus deconstructs a space and restructures it, so that visitors have to re-adjust their bearings and the way they move around, gaining in the process a new way of perceiving the exhibition site.

After researching the industrial history of these former maintenance and repair workshops for freight trains, Hans Schabus created a spatial project for the Grandes Locos that ties the various workshops together. The large wooden structure Monument for People on the Move, the size of an Airbus A321 aircraft, rests on turtles’ sculptures, symbols of protection and longevity that contrast with the rapid movements of the former workers and the trains on the tracks. Borrowing from a variety of artistic styles — from construction to the Vienna Secession (the tortoises are inspired by the Robert Oerley creatures under the bowls in the doorway of the Secession Building in Vienna) — Hans Schabus’s work creates a dialogue with the space and with the public, who are invited to cross the installation and interact.