crawling home again

Salzburg, 24. Juli – 22. August 2026

 

With works by Emilia Auersperg · Julia Belova · Teresa Berger · Carli Fridolin Biller · Rage · Mafalda Figueiredo ·
Daniel Gianfranceschi · Tamir Hadar · Leonie Holtkamp · Selma Laura Köran · Lilith May Peters ·
Johanna Strachwitz · Francisco Valença Vaz

 

Crawling home rather than simply coming home implies a sometimes-exhausting feat of strength.

“To crawl home” refers to an early childhood, almost animal-like—but above all, low-to-the-ground—shuffling motion. Instead of a triumphant homecoming with a confident stride, the title of this exhibition project—now in its second edition—presents us with an uncertain, tentative, and physical perspective on concepts of home, surroundings, arrival, and departure.

 

Rather than being understood as a state or a fixed topography, the concept of “home” is presented here as a process of exploration and inquiry—including the journey one takes to find or return to home. For the second time, the format initiated by Emilia Auersperg, Sophie M. Hollerweger, and Madelaine Williams brings together artists under this open premise. What comes together in these spaces are temporary and personal fragments as well as fleeting poetics. From a wide variety of

perspectives, the gathered works explore concepts of home, places of transition, and states of limbo.

 

Salzburg, in particular, must be understood as a city that—with its ...festivals, Mozartkugeln, World Heritage status, *The Sound of Music*, traditional urban planning, magnificent—and glorified—nature, ideals of landscape, Roman mosaics in courtyards, and a Baroque-style backdrop—takes its cultural identity and heritage for granted. In Salzburg, “home” can mean a postcard motif and an idyllic world—carved in Untersberg marble, polished for tourism, and institutionally preserved. But like any form of identity, every idea of what Salzburg is and can be is ultimately never complete, defined, or fully negotiated.
With Crawling Home, the initiators of this exhibition counter this static image with a vision of fragility, of the continuously negotiableand contradictory.

 

Ultimately, Crawling Home does not refer to a place, but rather to a modus operandi that conceives of places as ever-changing occurrences. Aspects of change and ongoing exploration shape states that are so ephemeral that, in the blink of an eye, they have long since changed and, in fact, were never states to begin with. The sociologist Michel de Certeau distinguished “places” as arrangements of fixed points within “spaces.” For spaces are constituted by activities and movements. Precisely because of their contrasting function to places, spaces are characterized by instability, ambiguity, and the potential for transformation. In contrast to a simple “place,” “space” thus always bears witness to and shares in the living. In this sense, Crawling Home presents not a static concept of home, but transformative constellations—dependent on a polyphonic cast of actors and non-conforming modes of relationship.

​

Instead of a single “home,” we encounter a multitude of spaces of the homely.

Text by Niklas Koschel