THE MAPPING PROJECT 2025

Amongst all the famous touristic attractions Salzburg has to offer, a whole other world has been thriving underneath its fame. Since several decades now, a vibrant and fluid landscape of performing arts has been growing, shaped by creative individuals, who found a home for their practices in Salzburg, or created structures and contexts that have been holding space for dance and performance ever since.

The idea for this map came during the community meetings I attended this year at SZENE Salzburg in the awaiting for the Choreographic Platform Austria 2025. Instead of the usual tourist map, guiding visitors to famous sights, museums, restaurants, shops, and pubs, I imagined a city map that reveals this rather hidden world of dance and performance, known to many yet visible only during festival seasons and other events.

Imagining such a map led to the conception of THE MAPP 2025, and THE MAPPING PROJECT 2025—the practice of mapping on-stage and off-stage practices of Salzburg-based artists, and other dance and performance related practitioners, in the fields of artistic production, education, training, research, scholarship, and care for the body. For the first time ever we have an image that represents almost the full extent and diversity of dance and performance related practices in Salzburg.

It shows us the hot spots as well as the outreach into the periphery, mapping 134 locations that have been holding space for dance and performance related practices, in one way or another, since as early as 1982. It gives form to a collective of people, venues and institutions, and shows us how the city has been “dancing” to its borders and beyond in the last 40 decades.