© Karoline Hadek

Under the guidance of Petra Hirschler and Reinhard Tötschinger, opens an external URL in a new window, 10 master's students visited the picturesque town of Gars am Kamp in the Waldviertel region from May 29 to June 1, 2025.

Dense descriptions can serve to bring us closer to the culture of a place. Dense Descriptions, the title of a book by Clifford Geertz, attempts to capture circumstances in their entirety and complexity through precise observation and detailed description—in contrast to a quantitative and cartographic approach. In literary texts, space is not only the setting for the action, but also a carrier of cultural meaning. Cultural norms, aesthetics, design principles, and value hierarchies find concrete, vivid form in literary space. At the same time, literary spaces influence planning processes and spatial decisions.

Through walks, observations, and changes of perspective, the students wrote dense descriptions of space, literary texts, and short stories. Twenty of the 40 texts written during the four-day stay in Gars am Kamp are printed in the publication Raum_Geschichten (2025). Ten of these follow the principle of dense spatial description: they are set in the outdoor swimming pool, an Asian restaurant, the local supermarket, the main square, and the outskirts of town, thus painting a holistic picture of the place.

The other 10 texts are short stories in which the students' creativity knew no bounds: “6 Weeks in Summer,” “An Incomplete Memory,” and “Heirlooms” tell of grandfather-grandchild relationships, “The Old Man” of longing for a lost love, “The Photographer” of young love, “Afternoon at the lido" tells of a tragic turn of events, “One More Week” of waiting, “Nepomuk & Me” of a very special friendship, “The Princess Path” travels to the Middle Ages, and “A Spark of Hope” to the future. The stories have one thing in common: they are all set in Gars am Kamp and thus explore the culture and everything that makes the place what it is.