TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Donaukanal is a concrete serpent that doubles as the city’s largest graffiti gallery and an urban jungle. We trace the emergence of a collective coalition of artists, plant whisperers, and drone pilots who engage in a long established space for international grafitti art. The activist planting of flora into interstitial spaces of concrete decay. Kanal Opal is the gemstone to be harvested out of aerosol ephemerality.

\The interventions at the confluence of urban art, rogue botany, and the techno-poetics of drone-enabled activism are part of an externalization process that puts the works of the one decade old Science Visualization Lab of the University of Applied Arts into new perspectives – the anarchy of public spaces.

Through autoethnographic drift and digital cartography, we document how these actors repurpose drones—originally designed for surveillance and warfare—as tools for lobbing seedbombs, Sedum and Sempervivum into inaccessible crevices of tagged retaining walls. The graffiti becomes a nutrient-rich substrate for vertical micro-gardens, which, in turn, destabilize the distinction between vandalism, gardening, and ecological protest.

We interrogate planting as a starting point for roots cracking concrete ideologies and drones buzzing like awkward pollinators over Vienna’s most chromatic corridor.