On its 26th birthday, the La Strada Graz festival looks back on its 25-year history: over the years it has developed, reinvented itself and, together with artists, given space to visions, experiments and metamorphoses. La Strada Graz has remained true to one of its goals from the very beginning - to regard the city as a stage, its inhabitants as actors and to pick up the people with art - with playful seriousness and serious play. Be it on the city's theatre stages, at special locations or in public spaces - the "playing fields" expanded visibly in joint research and field work with the artists and regional and urban initiatives. In this way, the use of urban and natural spaces, involving a wide variety of artistic disciplines, became a natural part of our artistic work.

Together with our long-standing partner institution "Lieux Publics - European and National Centre for Creations in Public Space Marseille" - and its director, close friend and companion Pierre Sauvageot, we initiated and prepared the foundation of the European network IN SITU in 2003. Currently, the project, which is continuously funded by the European Commission in seven programme phases, counts 19 partners and 13 associated partners from 20 nations. IN SITU believes in public space as a democratic place where art creates new perspectives, as a place of encounter and diversity, as an agora that can have social impact and create human value, as a stage that reveals artistic creation in direct form. Currently, with "UnCommon Spaces 2020-2024", the IN SITU network is committed not only to supporting innovative productions in public urban space, but also to providing longer-term support for selected artists - the Associated Artists - and their projects on burning issues of the future.

The four-year community art project in the Dachstein region serves as a connecting element between art, science, and everyday life. As early as 2015, La Strada invited artists such as the Dutch sound researchers and composers Strijbos & Van Rijswijk to the mountain alongside local alpinists. Years of engagement with the glacier, the natural environment, and cultural history culminated in the *Signal am Dachstein* project, which began in 2021 with a landscape opera. The work of five artists then became deeply integrated into the project: Marie-Theres Härtel, Christoph Huber, Katharina Pfennich, Christoph Szalay, and Stefanie Weberhofer, all of whom grew up in the region and observe firsthand the effects of climate change. Supporting them are mentors Toni Burger, Barbara Frischmuth, Peter Gruber, Bodo Hell, and Ernst Huber, each with a profound personal and artistic connection to this landscape.

With the audiovisual installation Signal vom Dachstein, La Strada brought together these artistic approaches at Schloss Trautenfels until November 3, 2024. The specially rearranged landscape opera by Strijbos & Van Rijswijk, created for the Marble Hall, combines glacier recordings to provide an immersive experience. Naturally, the mountain itself remains a central site, serving as an archive of natural and cultural history. Good news: after the winter break at Schloss Trautenfels, the exhibition will be extended for another season, reopening on April 11, 2025!

Throughout its run, the exhibition is accompanied by a variety of events at Schloss Trautenfels. Artistic contributions and factual discussions address themes explored since the 2021 landscape opera premieres: the glacier as a natural and cultural archive, biodiversity, forests and pastures, geology, meteorology, glaciology, and the touristic use of such natural environments.