...is an exhibition series exploring what architecture can be, challenging its definitions and offering new perspectives.


10.10.2025- 21.11.2025

DECEMBER IN THE OFFICE

by Anna Barbieri 

VERNISSAGE
10.10.2025 - 19:00
Gußriegelstraße 9
1100 Vienna





READING
PERFORMANCE
excerpts, fragments,
snippeets, maybe
an essay

07.11.2025 - 19:00
Gußriegelstraße 9
1100 Vienna

....is a reflection on architecture’s relation to work and labour. Architecture is work, yet the people and bodies whose labour shape its production remain largely invisible. At the forefront of every completed project stands the principal architect — rarely the employees or workers who sustain the process and production of built spaces. Their work is hidden behind screens—redrawing, planning, 3D modeling, and detailing—or tucked away in model-making cabinets. It emerges in long evenings and late nights spent revising layouts variations, or through countless phone calls and emails exchanged.

december in the office reflects on these unseen aspects of architectural labour through a combination of text and textile prints. The prints feature two photographs taken during long, tense working days in the weeks leading up to Christmas. This period, and the end of the year more generally, is especially stressful across capitalist professions, as accounting reports must be finalised, invoices claimed, and project phases closed to bill clients. Architecture, as a profession, is no exception. 

Installed like curtains, the prints offer glimpses into the often-overlooked labour that architecture generates beyond the construction site—within the office environment. Overlaid with a poem, they reflect the perspective of an architectural worker who has become—despite the creative industry’s constant denial—a commodity. The curtains also pose a question to those occupying FREDIANE.space: should they reveal the (art)work that interrogates the invisibility of labour and commodification within architectural practice, or expose their actual architectural practice—the work and labour performed in the space behind the curtains? Either way, one aspect remains hidden


Anna Barbieri is an artist and architectural worker whose theory-based artistic practice engages with the production of architecture and space, as well as their socio-political entanglements and implications. She studied architecture at the Glasgow School of Art and at TU Vienna, as well as Critical Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is part of the lo-fi electro pink punk artist performance band “Die Fitten Titten” and has shown her work at, among others, Tangente St. Pölten, at the ethnocineca film festival, and as part of the AzW summer cinema program.


annabarbieri.net
@anna_barbieros


    Can you eat it? Must it be permanent? Is it solely functional? Can it be temporary? Is it primarily art? Does it interact with its surroundings? Can it evoke emotions? Does it reflect culture? Can it adapt? Does it need a roof? Can it be modular? Must it adhere to specific styles? Is it influenced by technology? Does it involve collaboration? Can it be experimental? Does it have a social impact? Can it be vernacular? Does it need to be symmetrical? Can it be sustainable? Can it be fun?