Picnoleptic City (Rotterdam Edit)

Knut Åsdam realised this graffiti project for the first time in 1997 in Vienna, a repressive city full of Baroque, Medieval and nineteenth-century bourgeois architecture, but hardly any graffiti. Then again, it is also the city where Freud sketched out his theories of the unconscious. The urban unconscious is what interests Åsdam. In this piece he thematises quite literally what in further projects he addresses in a more fragmented way: the interaction between the city and its inhabitants or visitors, the dialogue between subjectivity and the state, between public space and private property. Graffiti as a temporal activity that places a body in the city at a particular moment in time - usually the darkness of night - and with a specific message.