20-05-25 // THE POWER TO INCLUDE AND EXCLUDE – INTERVIEW WITH ELKE KRASNY

Bernd Upmeyer spoke with Elke Krasny, who is Professor for Art and Education and Head of the Art and Education Programme at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship and her international lectures address ecological and social justice in the global present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, curatorial work, and contemporary art. The interview took place on May 20, 2025.

Cross-disciplinarity and Inclusiveness

Bernd Upmeyer: You originally studied theatre studies, literature, and philosophy at the University of Vienna before getting involved in urban and architectural topics. What can architects and urban designers learn from cultural studies when it comes to inclusiveness?
Elke Krasny: I think when we talk about where one comes from in terms of someone’s formation, it is also always important to look at the time when someone studied. In my case that is a long time ago. I studied in the 1980s, which was still during the period of the Cold War. When I finished studying, the Cold War had just ended, and we began to live in a new global world order that was no longer defined by a bipolar disorder, but a multipolar global world disorder, if you will. When I studied in the 1980s, the ideas of cross-disciplinarity or inclusiveness, which we are going to discuss, were not yet part of the academic agenda. There were also no urban studies existing yet at the time, at least not at the University of Vienna, where I studied. There were no such things as gender studies or studies on diversity and inclusion yet either. Gender studies were introduced formally in 1991. However, through literature and philosophy I was nevertheless introduced to a certain way of thinking beyond disciplines or of thinking critically about disciplines, and I learned certain approaches useful to reading the world critically. What these studies have in common is that one learns how to do close readings of texts and precise and perhaps even speculative analyses. Furthermore, at the time, we were taught to anchor our analysis of literature in the social and political conditions of their historical context.
These approaches are very useful critical tools for the analysis of the urban condition, the production of urban spaces, and the understanding of how urban conditions are spatialized. There was hardly any feminist theory taught at the time when I studied. Only after my studies did I begin to engage more and more with feminist, queer feminist, and anticolonial theoretical and philosophical tools that I am using today to study spatial and urban conditions. And, I continuously seek to learn more about transnational feminisms, as this is a very dynamic field where much new thinking is constantly being produced and published. In that sense, your studies can give you certain tools, and if you use them, they unlock or make it possible for you to learn new and other things.

BU: How did you end up working on architectural and urban topics nevertheless?
EK: Because my professional work started in an architect’s office, which is equally important for my trajectory as my studies. I worked for more than three years in the office of Hermann Czech. He is an Austrian architect now in his 80s and someone who, I would say, is even anti-capitalist in a certain way. He is an intellectual architect who had an amazing library. When I started working there, I was only 22, and it was like an apprenticeship in exhibition making in a time when the word curator had not even been introduced in the German-speaking language context yet. When I worked at Hermann Czech’s office, the office did the exhibition design for Wunderblock, a large-scale exhibition with 1200 objects of science and objects of art for the Wiener Festwochen, Vienna Festival. This 1989 exhibition took place in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s death and, in a very unusual and innovative way, brought together histories of science and histories of art to approach the formation or the history of the modern soul. This exhibition was an interim temporary use of the mid-nineteenth-century winter riding school, which was part of the former imperial stables, which at the turn of the millennium were then transformed into today’s Museumsquartier. At Hermann Czech’s office I was the person who did all the communication between the exhibition makers, Cathrin Pichler and Wolfgang Pircher, and the architects who designed the exhibition. “Exhibition maker” was the term used for what we call curator today.
I learned many, many different things during this process. Most importantly, I began to understand that and how our world is spatialized, that the material and spatial conditions of our world have epistemic effects, effects on how we come to know the world both socially and aesthetically and later also ecologically. I also learned that urban sites and buildings can be redefined when they begin to include new uses and thus take on completely new meanings and functions. Working on the Wunderblock exhibition also taught me that it is possible to bring together diverse and plural knowledges, in this case history of science and history of art. The way in which this exhibition approached history and space made me very aware of how history and space can include and exclude. History writing and spaces have the power to include and exclude knowledges and bodies. Although the word “inclusion” is usually not the terminology I use, I think a lot about spatial and epistemic justice in architecture and urbanism, as I am interested in how bodies and minds and feelings and knowledges are being included in or excluded from spatial, material, and epistemic conditions in which we find ourselves…

… the complete interview was published in MONU #38 on the topic of Inclusive Urbanism on October 13, 2025.

Title: The Power to Include and Exclude
Project: Interview with Elke Krasny
Date: May 2025
Type: Commissioned interview
Topic: Inclusive Urbanism
Organizer: MONU
Status: Published
Publications: MONU #38, P. 53-60
Interviewer: Bernd Upmeyer