Students from TU Wien and the University of Applied Arts are preparing various challenges and solutions related to climate change for participating schoolchildren as part of a course. The interactive exhibition encourages experimental and playful engagement with scientific content, while the artistic perspective stimulates ingenuity and creativity in connection with engineering and technology.

Cultural Collisions begins after the exhibition: pupils and teachers experience a scientifically and artistically prepared topic, take it with them and work on it further in the corresponding subjects. The participating museums provide support in workshops throughout the semester on the way to creating their own artwork.

Workshop at mumok 

Mumok, with its core competence in the cultural and intellectual history of the 20th and 21st centuries, has a substantial responsibility to discuss and reduce the discrepancy between everyday life and increasingly specialized and largely abstract professional and social demands.

Modern and contemporary art challenges existing rules and conventions. It often follows a transdisciplinary approach, which the mumok also pursues in its educational work focusing on creative learning. We invite students to realize their creative projects and present them in the museum. The participating schools are invited to an intensive program through the entire museum building. They will experience an interactive exhibition visit, a hands-on lecture on "What is art and what can art do?", brainstorming sessions on their own works in class, and a participatory workshop on design.

The final exhibition will be conceived and realized in the spirit of cocreation with a team of class curators on the mumok premises. It will be accompanied by a comprehensive program of guided tours, lectures, and publications.

Together with the students, we will turn the mumok into a dialogical place of education that brings together complex topics, thinks about science and art together, and makes the results that are developed together visible.

Workshop at the Vienna Museum of Science and Technology

In the workshop at the Vienna Museum of Science and Technology, we focus on something that is often not associated with science, but is very central to us humans in every respect - and especially in times of social change: our feelings.

In the approximately 2-hour workshops, the pupils first experience an interactive and discursive tour through the exhibitions, in which various aspects of the project theme are illuminated in a youth-friendly way: How have technological developments contributed to climate change? What answers can innovative research and technology provide to current questions? How did society deal with the challenges of paradigm shifts in cultural and technological history in the past? What story(s) do the objects tell - and how are they different from art objects? And above all: what does all this trigger in me? At each station, we take time to notice our (climate) feelings and the needs they point to. We creatively implement these reflections and thus take a step towards our own message, which the students want to convey in their artworks at the end of the project.

This approach via emotional competence invites the students into a dialogue in which everything may be expressed - between fear and hope, resistance and indifference - in order to experience space for and dealing with one's own and other positions, and to create a basis for self-empowered and responsible decision-making - the basis for broad participation and co-creation in a common social process.

After the project starts, the participating students work together with their teachers to create a work of art on the current project theme. There are no limits to creativity: from paintings to sculptures, poems to dance performances – anything is possible!

The schools are supported by methods and materials developed by their teachers in accompanying training courses at the Pädagogische Hochschule Wien.

The grand finale of Cultural Collisions is the public presentation of the artworks created in class. The mumok museum provides the stage for this and, together with the participating students, curates the final exhibition of the project.