Wantalon: Curated Art Tours

I happened across an article about two artists from Leipzig, Petra Mattheis and Sascha Nau, who had bought a Gründerzeit apartment building in Zeitz that had stood empty for more than ten years and wanted to restore it. Since the inner-German border came down, Zeitz has lost close to a third of its inhabitants and almost a quarter of its buildings stand empty – and in that they see creative freedom.

I grew up half an hour from Zeitz and have known the town since childhood. All the more surprising, then, to come across a name there that I knew from the Kirby community. I wrote to Sascha there and then to wish them well with the project. That is how we got in touch.

The first time my partner and I were invited over by Sascha and Petra, the house was still a building site. In the back garden, among bricks and mortar, Petra told us about her idea, which had come out of the pandemic, when museums and galleries were closed: if nobody comes to the art any more, the art has to go out. Not into another building, but onto the street. Past ruins, wasteland and vacancy, which then stop being holes and become places.

Wantalon is Petra’s art project; the design is Sascha’s, the technical implementation mine. In Old High German, wantalōn means to turn, to transform, to reshape.

Art You Have to Walk To

You open the app and see the town as a map, dotted with numbered points. Each point is a station, and each station belongs to a trail – a route Petra and Sascha have laid through the town, with a theme and an order. Below the map you swipe through the available trails, and the points change with each one.

Start one and the map turns into navigation: it sorts the stations by which one is closest to where you are. Tapping a station only tells you how far you still have to go. Not until you are standing in front of it does it give up what has been left there – a text, a video, a recording, sometimes made in that very spot. Station by station, you discover the works of the artists on the trail.

Four Trails in Two Cities

Four trails have been made so far, three in Zeitz and one in Leipzig.

• #zeitzseeing (Zeitz): The first one. Petra and Sascha wandered their own town and photographed what they saw – Vacancies, Quiet Quitting, Concrete Expressionism, Passing Sculptures. Forty-seven stations over six kilometers.
• Schatten (Zeitz): Came out of an open call. Ten artistic positions from Albania, Germany, Switzerland and the USA, curated by Diana Artus and Petra.
• Gespräche über Kohle (Zeitz): What mining did to the region, told at the places where you can still see it and by people who keep the memory of it alive. Starts at the train station.
• Dekadensprung (Leipzig): Voices from the west of Leipzig, recorded for Wunderwesten, the online magazine the two of them have been running there since 2013.

A Greeting as a Digital Postcard

Once you have collected enough stations, you unlock the postcards. They are finished designs by Petra and Sascha with pieces cut out, and into those holes you drop your own photos from your phone. There is nothing to write; the words are already on the card. The app renders the result as an image and hands it to the share menu. What arrives at the other end is half the artists’ and half yours – the badge for keen trail-walkers.

An Aside on the Tech Stack

Wantalon is built as a web app inside a shell: Ionic and Capacitor ship it as a proper iOS and Android app, Nuxt runs underneath, and the maps come from Mapbox. Petra and Sascha maintain the content themselves in Kirby – every station, every text, every image. The app fetches it from there.

Funnily enough, Kirby Headless, the plugin I use today to hang Kirby as a backend onto apps and frontends, has its origin in this project.

Uranium Instead of Lignite

My home village of Groitschen lies in the Ronneburg mining district. I remember the spoil heaps of the uranium mines, visible in the distance from my childhood bedroom, even though extraction had stopped before I was born. With us it was uranium, in Zeitz it was lignite. What happens to a region when it loses the thing it lived on – nobody there had to explain that to me. Maybe that is why I put unpaid time into it as well.