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Instead of the pavilion building, visitors will be confronted with a huge barrier rising in front of them like a massif with the pavilion only looking out at its far corners. The outside is as rejective as the inside is accessible: along labyrinthine staircases, the way leads up to the summit where viewers will finally be granted a look at the sea and the city through skylights. With a bold gesture, Hans Schabus’ work “The Last Land” transfers the myth of the mountain enveloping Austria to the city on the lagoon built on water. For Hans Schabus, the exhibition space has never been a neutral area of presentation but always a specific site with its coordinates and numerous relations which he takes possession of in order to subject it to a physical and psychological redimensioning. A meticulous process of drawing closer also preceded the present work for the Austrian Pavilion. Preparations started with research work in the artist’s studio in Vienna where Hans Schabus gathered material on the history of the Austrian Pavilion, the first international fairs as well as on the past of the two neighboring countries Austria and Italy. The approach continued in the form of a film titled “Val Canale,” a poetical camera movement through the Kanaltal. Shot from a helicopter, the film offers a bird’s-eye view and suggests itself as “the documentation of a journey” from a narrow Alpine valley into the vastness of the Friuli Venezia plain. Venice is finally reached by boat: the photo work „Mare Adriatico, Venezia, 13 Maggio 2005“ shows the artist against the backdrop of the city on the lagoon in his boat “forlorn. Besides investigating the airspace and the waters, preparatory research also included an inquiry into the history of the premises on which the Austrian Pavilion was built. The edifice is located on the island of Santa Elena, which was formed in the late nineteenth century with materials from demolished houses and excavations from the recently constructed industrial port. After the new island had been a fallow field and used by the Italian army for exercises, a housing estate for the working class was built under Benito Mussolini in the 1920s, and a small part of the ground was ceded to the Biennale di Venezia, which had been founded in 1895. In 1935, the Austrian Pavilion was built, based on plans by Josef Hoffmann, in the section furthest back. In 1938, Austria moved over into the German pavilion; it returned to its own pavilion in 1948. The historical background and the nature of Hoffmann’s building are the parameters around which Hans Schabus constructed his work. With the art area stretching in front of it and the city behind it, the Austrian Pavilion constitutes an end, a demarcation line on the Biennial premises: Hans Schabus has dissolved its architecture and translated it into a new function. The gateway-like structure is burdened with a new skin which, like a rocky mass, buries the landmark building. With its crystalline surface formation, the artwork presents itself as a technologically defined, threatening image of a mountain. It does not imitate nature but is a constructed symbol. The closed exterior does not reveal the intricate timber construction inside which becomes only accessible through a rear entrance. From there, planks and stairs, which bring to mind the “Carceri,” Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, lead up to the summit. The mountain, like all works by Hans Schabus, has to be explored and taken possession of by its visitors. As the artist has made the site his own in the course of his analytic preparatory work, the visitor is now asked to do so physically. Overcoming bodily, spatial, and temporal boundaries creates very personal moments of experience that result from the artist’s both personal and artistic examination of its nature. Last, not least, “The Last Land” seems to reflect a sculptor’s dream to board a territory where the foundations for an entire city were once laid with a monumental gesture, with an equally bold statement and to deliberately thwart his venture, however, at the same time by emphasizing its only temporary character amidst the fair of national artistic manifestations. By giving the city without ground and mountain its probably first and last elevation, Hans Schabus, by emphasis and by means of contrast, points out that the soul of the city on the lagoon too is to be found neither in the eerie depths nor in the clear heights and (in memory of Arthur Schnitzler) outlines it as a vast domain rat
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