GAM: What have you learned from the architecture students at Graz University of Technology?

MT: Even though it might not sound exactly new, I’ve learned in practice that the material world is just as important as the world of ideas, and that it is possible to hold them together simultaneously. Working with matter and space is actually one process. Architecture students embody that capacity. I’ve also come to understand that every argument has a material, physical reality, and that we are responsible for it. And for the first time, I really came to understand Conceptual Art as a concrete cognitive practice. It works through the relationship between an idea and a real object: when architecture students look at an abstract floor plan, they don’t just see lines; they read it as space, as something real. It’s like a musician reading notation and hearing the music. That’s how I learned from our students how space emerges from a line. Beyond that I was always surprised how easily they could connect what seemed irreconcilable, and how, each semester, they bravely agreed to begin an adventure with us. Most importantly, somewhere in that process, they made me listen differently.

GAM: How has teaching at the Institute of Contemporary Art (IZK) changed since you took over from Hans Kupelwieser?

MT: Back then, in 2015, as I started working at IZK, the faculty was in the middle of a ten-year evaluation of all institutes, and I was asked to prepare material that would represent the previous decade at our institute. I had already spent a semester with students working on Hans Kupelwieser’s archive, including the projects he developed together with Daniela Brasil, Nicole Pruckermayr, and Brigitte Kovacs, but there was still so much more in the institute’s holdings, in what I had inherited and found on site. So, I stayed at the faculty the entire summer and went through the digitized material in a really thorough way. 

In parallel, I interviewed colleagues across the faculty about their understanding of the relationship between architecture and exhibiting, and I also spoke with many students. At the time, we were working on an exhibition meant to mark 100 years of the Faculty of Architecture. The exhibition didn’t take place, but I still have this incredible set of interviews, including one with Joost Meuwissen, whose work I deeply respect and whom I personally adored. It was, in fact, his last interview. Speaking with my colleagues was the best way to understand the faculty’s internal logic. I was deeply inspired by their freedom and intellectual precision, their ideas and proposals, and impressed with how they interpreted and approached art and exhibition-making in relation to architecture. Entering the field of architecture, I realized that it addresses questions more directly, pragmatically, and with a different analytical clarity than art.

What became clear to me through those conversations was that our institute should not, under any circumstances, be ‘in the service’ of architecture simply because we are part of an architecture faculty. On the contrary, the institute must establish a space where art can exist independently; otherwise, it can’t really have an impact. It needed to become a space where, for a moment, students can forget that they are architects. I still believe this is the only way they can realize what art can do in relation to architecture, in both theory and practice. You cannot teach art, but you can try to create the conditions for it to evolve. In that sense, IZK became a place where we all faced the challenge, again and again, to answer one question that can never be definitively resolved: What is art?

GAM: You have established a more research-based approach at the institute. What was particularly important to you in this regard?

MT: I have always been, and still am, cautious with the term ‘research’ in relation to art. In my view, artistic practice begins not with research in an academic sense, but with a form of investigating, asking, and revealing of relations. Art functions in an investigative manner without belonging to the institutional academic research format. This is where I see a key difference. However, in recent years the term ‘research in art’ has become an academic format which somewhat displaces or obscures the investigative dimension of artistic practice. Because art is increasingly perceived as a ‘research tool,’ the university requires a very particular vocabulary and form of legibility. These requirements are not neutral. Once artistic work is presented in the vocabulary of funding and assessment, it may benefit from administrative support more easily, but it also begins to reshape the understanding of what art is. We don’t necessarily know where and how art emerges. The research format can pull it into a regime of institutional validation that starts to resemble market logics. In the lineage of Conceptual Art, the term ‘investigation’ can be understood as a form of artistic practice. Rather than primarily creating objects, art examines the conditions of its own meaning, as something produced relationally and within context.

GAM: How did you balance this position with a system that requires research funding?

MT: At a certain point, we started applying for grants as a way to articulate our particular approach to artistic research and to define our contribution within that field. The question was how the artistic process can evolve and assert itself within academic structures without losing its unpredictability and intensity. And the key was to develop an investigative pedagogy that could extend into the public sphere. This meant moving beyond the walls of the university together with the students, and framing investigative teaching as a public practice connected to exhibition-making. It opened up different forms of responsibility and was the reason why our teaching and exhibiting practice was taking place in the public realm, in art institutions or exhibition spaces like Kunsthaus Graz, steirischer herbst, Camera Austria, <rotor> Centre for Contemporary Art, Forum Stadtpark, Grazer Kunstverein, and Annenstrasse 53,—a space where IZK students and assistants, artists, theorists, and workers in art and culture, all collaborated together, also on an international scale.

GAM: The institute was involved in various projects and publications that brought different disciplines and people together.

MT: It was one way to expand, grow, and leave significant traces. Antonia Majača developed the project “The Incomputable” at IZK. Her subsequent book Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis (2026) argues that climate breakdown is an irreducibly incomputable problem, one that cannot be solved through “algorithmic optimization” or fantasies of “cybernetic planetary management.” Another important contribution was Wilfried Kuehn’s research project which introduced the novel term ‘Curatorial Design,’ along with the publication Curatorial Design: A Place Between (2025), coauthored by Dubravka Sekulić. And the exceptional project “Komuna Maro,” developed by Ana Jeinić in collaboration with Ana Dana Beroš, investigates how social space and knowledge related to the Northern Adriatic are produced and represented.

GAM: Another integral methodological and didactic tool for public learning was the “Growing Trajectories” program.

MT: I am interested in productive relationships between people, ideas, methods, objects, situations . . . “Growing Trajectories” became crucial in this sense. It embodied IZK’s aim of developing through practice: artists, scholars, and authors were invited to teach a course or a workshop, produce a novel element together with students, and in this way actively expand the institute’s conceptual framework. Their contributions became part of IZK’s everyday infrastructure, shaping what was taught and how it was taught on multiple levels. They were introducing themes and research fields like “Memory of the World,” an online free library where students could become librarians themselves; and also renaming and conceiving modules like “Curatorial Design” or “Knowledge Forms.” These new ideas, methods, and teaching tools introduced concrete resources or design elements to the institute, such as dedicated library sections and media lab materials, a new typeface, a visual identity, and spatial interventions, as well as pieces of furniture. Such input remained in place after the visit, functioning as long-term ‘building blocks’ for future cohorts. Examples include “Laboratory for Visual and Sonic Practice” (Armin Linke together with Simon Oberhofer), “Research Space” (Dejan Marković), “From the Roundabout to the Round Table” (Eyal Weizman), “Public Library Book Scanner” (“Memory of the World / Public Library”: Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and Femke Snelting), “Renaming Process” (Branimir Stojanović), “Knowledge Forms” (Antonia Majača), and “Hidden Curriculum” (Annette Krauss).

GAM: What can we learn from these collaborations?

MT: That collaboration establishes relationships, and those relationships always have a material side. For me it is reciprocal, concerning both art and architecture. We were also lucky that many of our guests were highly experienced and, at the same time, right at the peak of their practice—opening new fields, new approaches, new vocabularies. At Graz University of Technology, it wasn’t always easy to claim that art is not an aesthetic add-on to architecture. Art should change how we perceive and think. It creates possibilities. It is substantially constitutive to architecture and design, and therefore influences our everyday lives. It was truly exciting to follow how students’ perspectives shifted, and how those shifts found a material equivalent in what they produced and how they worked.

GAM: Which encounters at the faculty do you look back on with particular fondness?

MT: First of all, the students and my colleagues—everyone was incredibly inspiring for me. I learned so much; it was a new world. I met devoted, talented, and intelligent people across the faculty and throughout the university. I loved working with brave minds!

I feel very lucky to have worked with Dubravka Sekulić, an architect and researcher with a razor-sharp mind. Her presence strongly shaped the institute over many years—guest editing GAM – Graz Architecture Magazine 14: Exhibiting Matters with her was an extraordinary experience. I also had the privilege of collaborating with Milena Stavrić and the Institute of Architecture and Media’s Shape Lab team on our art-architecture-science projects for the Berlin Biennale, Kunsthaus Graz, and now Skulptur Projekte Münster.

Over the last two years, my colleagues from the Institute of Experimental Physics, Marcus Ossiander and Martin Schultze, as well as Ahmad Darkhabani and I from IZK, along with students from both institutes, have been experimenting with light, photography, time, and irreversibility—allowing art and quantum physics to challenge each other in real time. It has influenced our views, even though we didn’t fully share the same vocabulary. We had to unlearn before we could learn. However, this experience forced us to trust and rethink our assumptions.

GAM: You mentioned your exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz in 2025. In reference to your public montage from 2020, it was titled “On Love Afterwards.” Media theorist Friedrich Kittler once remarked: “The opposite of war is not peace, but love.”—What follows love?

MT: Let’s think about love as something lived within concrete conditions, as something shaped by social and political realities. I don’t believe that love is something exclusively private and tender, as if it were simply sitting opposite war. Love is also framed by laws, institutions, economies, borders, class divisions. In that sense, love is not apolitical; it is a point where the political becomes intimate. Love is a relation shaped by the material and ideological structures in which it is lived. So, the question ‘What follows love?’ isn’t a nostalgic evocation—on the contrary, it relates to the ongoing present. It is closely tied to the ways in which we are positioned within those structures and formed as subjects by them. Yet, it is precisely within this conditioning that the possibility of political action emerges: the possibility of positioning ourselves differently as subjects, so that what comes ‘after love’ is not a collapse, but another form of love, one that makes social transformation possible.

GAM: Thank you for the conversation.