Wantalon: Curated Art Tours

In 2022, Petra Mattheis and Sascha Nau pitched me their idea: an app that brings art into public space. The concept was born during the pandemic, when museums and galleries were closed. Why not turn the city itself into a gallery? The app takes users by the hand and wanders with them through the city – past ruins, wastelands and vacant buildings that are not obstacles, but sites for artistic interventions.

We got to know each other through the Kirby community. Petra and Sascha conceived the content and design, I took on the technical implementation. What convinced me right away: I grew up in a neighbouring town of Zeitz. I know the area, the empty houses, the quiet streets. From the very beginning, Wantalon was a personal project for me too. At the same time, I had already built several apps with Ionic – so the technical foundation was there.

Wantalon on the App Store and Google Play

Wantalon is free and respects your privacy – no ads, no tracking.

→ Wantalon on the App Store
→ Wantalon on Google Play

An interactive map guides you to the stations of a trail. As you approach a station, it gets unlocked – you actually have to be there in person. Once you’ve visited a certain number of stations, you can send digital postcards. For more information, check out Wunderwesten.

The Trails

Wantalon now features four trails – three in Zeitz and one in Leipzig. Each trail has its own theme and its own character. What they all share is that stations only unlock when you’re within a 20-metre radius. You really do have to get moving.

#zeitzseeing (Zeitz)

The first trail approaches the city on foot, as a flâneur. The photographs by Petra Mattheis and Sascha Nau are puzzle pieces of a city that don’t form a complete picture – the missing parts only emerge by walking through Zeitz yourself, pausing, looking and moving on. The trail is divided into four sections: Vacancies, Quiet Quitting, Concrete Expressionism and Passing Sculptures.

Schatten (Zeitz)

The Schatten (Shadow) trail emerged from an open call and brings together works by eight artists and two artist collectives from Albania, Germany, Switzerland and the USA. An interdisciplinary, digital exhibition that engages with the theme of shadow in many ways – from electromagnetic sound investigations to narratives of railway tracks to past life stories. The trail was curated by Diana Artus and Petra Mattheis.

Gespräche über Kohle (Zeitz)

Coal mining has shaped the area around Zeitz for centuries. With Germany’s coal phase-out set for 2035, the region is facing yet another structural transformation. This trail makes the impact of mining tangible through specific locations and complements them with interviews with local actors who preserve the memory of the region’s industrial heritage. Six stations, starting at the train station – and those who walk attentively through the city will spot the crossed hammer and pick symbol on many buildings.

Dekadensprung (Leipzig)

The first trail outside of Zeitz leads through Leipzig’s west side. Dekadensprung follows the traces of people who have shaped their neighbourhood with projects and initiatives over the past decades. At each station, you can listen to why these places hold a special significance for the respective actors. The trail is based on the online magazine Wunderwesten, launched in 2013, which documents the urban transformation of Leipzig’s west.

Technology

Hybrid App on the Frontend

Under the hood, Wantalon is a web app built with the Ionic Framework. Ionic ships with Capacitor as its runtime to deliver the web app as a native iOS and Android app. Being a Vue enthusiast, the choice of frontend framework was easy.

Ionic’s own components mimic the look of native applications – but since Wantalon has its own design language, I hand-crafted most of the controls. Vite serves as the bundler, and we use Mapbox for the map views.

Kirby CMS on the Backend

The backend runs on Kirby CMS. Petra and Sascha manage all the content themselves – stations, texts, images – and the app fetches the data via the Kirby Query Language API. Since Kirby isn’t designed to be used as a headless CMS out of the box, I use my own plugin Kirby Headless, which enables token-based loading of KQL data and handles multilingual setups. On the frontend side, Nuxt Kirby, my Kirby integration for Nuxt, lazily fetches data for individual pages.

• Kirby Headless: Kirby plugin for token-based KQL data loading, also suitable for multilingual Kirby setups
• Nuxt Kirby: Kirby CMS integration for Nuxt