Established since 2009, first in the Winterhafen (Danube) before moving to its current home on the banks of The Traun River, south of the Linz Industrial Area and in particular the Voestalpine steel refinement and manufacture site, this decommissioned repair ship has served for many years, as a site of artistic activity. 

Julian Stadon grew his fascination and participation in the life of this vessel, during a serendipitous long stay, during the first lockdown of the Covid pandemic in 2019. During those long, disconnected days, void of Internet and human contact, Stadon began what has become a 5 year long now, series of actions that traverse basic functional projects in relation to clean water, general repair and maintenance, to more aesthetic renovations, gardening and explorations, that now has evolved into the Islands of the Day Before project and several of its subprojects. 

These have included establishing riverbank garden beds, a new upper deck, a vlog series, a zine for fisher punks, inspired by the invasive black goby fish (called Untergrundel) several semester long site-specific student projects through his Ludic Ecologies course at the Interface Cultures Programme at Kunstuniversität Linz, fermentation projects, canoe facilitated salvage and scavenging journeys up and down the Traun, to most recently, establishing a 3 year soil rehabilitation study, worm farms and a soon to be build 2000 litre fungal/fermentation facilitated bioreactor and a complex, solar powered environmental sensing ecosystem that runs on the recently developed, upgraded TeleAgriCulture kit, via the LoRAWAN network and connects not only to 2 other sites in Linz, but also so an ever growing list of international nodes. 

The boat is facilitated by Stadtwerkstatt Linz and maintained by the Donautics Kulturverein, which Stadon has been a member of since 2019. 

This ship acts as a beacon of opportunity and inspiration and is one of the main sites that our projects evolve from and are developed at, through invited artist in residencies, student excursions and team projects.