VIENNA.- As the third and final project in the series FOOTNOTES, Slovenian artist Sašo Sedlaček is presenting a new site-specific project in the Secession's display case. There are always niches in city space, in services, laws or even the outer space that people have forgotten or have never thought about. These niches are exactly what Sašo Sedlaček looks for. His primary interest seems to be things that people overlook and the ways they can be made useful once again. He sends home-made beggar robots to shopping malls where human begging is prohibited and enchants people with his creature (BEGGAR 0.0, 2006); he creates and advertises a recycling laboratory kit for paper brick production (NO LEGO, 2005) and demonstrates its possible tactical use by building a wall in front of a shopping mall with bricks made of direct advertising flyers (JUST DO IT!, 2003).

One might say that Sedlaček's works result from a subversive recycling of scientific, legal or technological facts, employing DIY (do-it-yourself) and collaborative methods. Considering discarded space and European geopolitics, his interest has recently turned toward certain historically rich and rather ambivalent national, territorial and cultural relations in Central Europe and toward personal strategies of rethinking, revitalizing or overwriting these.

As he polemically wrote:
“Probably every European nation carries a territory in its memory, which sometime in the past extended well beyond its present-day borders. From a nationalistic point of view, present territorial maps seem like amputees. However, with new integrations in today's post-Cold War world order, it seems that many territorial maps are being redrawn again. This is actually an opportunity for reestablishment of some historical economic and cultural environments that were once successful, like the Austro -Hungarian Empire — the major historical and cultural reference for every Central European nation. Austria is showing us by way of its recent economic and cultural expansion into the territories that were only a few years ago still behind the iron curtain, that such concepts are not only a thing of the past. Today, there is no need anymore to create new countries or officially move the borders in Europe; these can be moved simply from one apartment to another. Territory is not only an abstract notion. At a personal level, it is above all a piece of real estate: an individual's territory is his house or apartment.”

Accordingly, Sedlaček's project is a promotion of the real estate trade. Similarly to his earlier projects, he draws attention to hidden places and strategies that can be key to future developments in the region. At the same time, he finds a way to promote his own art — is it a singular artistic move, or can this gesture be seen as representing a core strategy that leads to mutual benefit in this ambiguous situation?

Ö-U Immobilien employs a sort of urban mimicry when appearing as an advertisement board in the display case. Addressing directly the capital of Austria, this final project in the series FOOTNOTES once again articulates critical comments on the predicaments of life in the city, focusing on individual aspects of urban and regional development in a personal and non-spectacular way — in small print, so to speak.