Freedom Reloaded

The city of Vienna commissioned Roland Graf’s artist collective Assocreation to remake their Freedom lettering (installed as a piece of guerrilla art in 2005) and turn it into a permanent 3D light graffiti. The lettering, which is made out of a 50m long yellow drainage pipe, became a landmark on a basketball cage between the traffic lanes of Vienna’s city ring road at Margaretengürtel. It marks an urban non-lieu used for sport and recreation by many of Vienna’s youths and immigrants. Mounted on a chain-link fence, it is a big word with two sides to it. The Freedom lettering at this location is reminiscent of a marketing slogan for teenagers that oscillates between fantasy and everyday reality — as such a slogan it was also used as the opening title in Katharina Weingartner’s movie Sneaker Stories, which featured this basketball cage and its players in the context of an ​“international cycle of control and commodification”. The new LED retrofitted Freedom lettering was connected to the public power grid on March 12, 2013.