Off the Map

The Invisibilization of Migrant and Working-Class Communities in Viennese Tourist Maps and Tours

I have learnt something very important from working with relatively new community radios in north-east Syria over the past few years: how state policies and official narratives or mainstream discourses play a key role in the process of invisiblization of marginalized communities.

For decades, the local population of al-Jazeera, al-Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces in east Syria (Kurds, Arabs, Armenians and Syriacs alike) were almost non-existent to the rest of the country (the urban and power centers further west). Their dialects and popular cultures were either completely silenced or, at best, caricatured and stereotyped as a rural, backward 'other', as Bedouins. Even their maps were often ignored in geography lessons at school, except as a source of oil and wheat for the rest of the country.

Yet, when historic opportunities arise – as with the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution in 2011 and the subsequent withdrawal of the regime from the North-East – these previously marginalized and silenced communities started to assert themselves and their existence, past and present. In other words, they started to become visible; they were on the map again (especially with all the international attention given to the fight against Daesh in these areas).

The simple act of speaking and hearing their local dialects on those local community radio stations, or talking about and celebrating their rich popular cultures, became in itself an act of self-assertion, an act of resistance. Thus, and despite their amateurishness in terms of professional journalistic standards, these radios became platforms or tools of visiblization. In the words of sociologist Benno Herzog (Invisibilization of Suffering, 2020), “Making silence heard, giving voice to the silenced and bringing the invisibilized back into the public domain, are therefore fundamental tasks of solidarity in reaching a higher degree of social integration.”

Visiting Vienna over the years and trying to discover interesting things to see in the city, I was often surprised to observe similar dynamics of invisiblization in relation to migrant and working class communities and the suburbs of so-called “Red Vienna” – despite the very different context and very different actors. Most, if not all, official tourist guides and tours that I have seen would only focus on imperial Vienna and the turn-of-the-century bourgeois culture.

Of course Vienna is not peculiar in this regard. We can find similar dynamics in many other imperial centers across Europe. But very few of them were as lucky to witness the social, political, cultural and architectural experiment known as “Red Vienna”, an experiment that, I would argue, tried to do exactly the opposite of what the present-day mainstream tourist guides and tours are doing – it tried to make those marginal migrant and working class communities visible, and beautiful.

Despite the increasing trend to exploit it's aesthetic aspects as a touristic value, which marginalizes the underlying political utopia, I started to wonder, if today's invisibilized communities living in the beautiful districts of former Red Vienna had an opportunity to make themselves visible again, to put themselves on the map. If they take on the perspective of a tourist in Vienna, how would they - as relevant urban actors - want to be represented? What would they want to put on an alternative city map, and what alternative narratives would they tell us about Vienna?

That is what I wanted to find out through this project, through visiting both key landmarks of Red Vienna, and current social housing projects, which attempt to meet integration challenges, and further through talking to residents and members of the local communities.

My derive starts from the most representative historical Red Vienna building complex in Margareten, the Reumannhof (1924-26), to the functionalistic Theodor Körner Hof (1951-55), and by passing the Favoritenstrasse - the "chic" shopping mall for migrant communities - arrives at the newly built Sonnwendviertel, where in mixed typologies of subsidized housing, cooperatives and so-called "Baugruppen" forms of co-living are probed. The stops include the youth center 5erHaus, informal meeting places like the bakery "Semmerl", the formerly squatted Favoritner Arbeiter Klub "Ernst Kirchweger Haus", and the discoursive space "Grätzelmixer". Interview partners include not only the accidental encounters along this route, but also first generation Kurdish and union activist Ali Gedik, filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub, artist and researcher Jannik Franzen. These interviews have been conceived to meet the interests of the audiences of the above mentioned Syrian community radio stations, by relating the collected articulations about an imagery of selfrepresentation with narrations of historical and current migrations from Kurdish regions in Turkey and Syria. The resulting audio pieces will be further disseminated in the programs of Arta.

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Shiar Youssef is a Syrian-Kurdish journalist who has been living in exile in western Europe for over 15 years. He now works as the Managing Director of Arta for Media and Development, a nonprofit organisation that runs three popular community radio stations in north-east Syria (Arta FM, Al-Furatiya and Zin FM). Since 2011, he has also worked as a consultant and trainer with many independent media projects and campaigns in the Middle East and Europe.