The graffiti project Picnoleptic City: hysterical time (1997) took place in Vienna, faded capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Laced with Baroque, Medieval, and 19thnineteenth- century bourgeois architecture, this is the city where Freud sketched out his theories of the unconscious. Well appointed, well ordered streets are kept silent by the repressive weight of the city’s self-image as one of the homes of bourgeois Modernity.

The beige and grey uniformity of painted walls stifles voices that usually breakout onto the surface, muting the incessant scrawl that mutters incoherently at passers-by in other towns and cities. This babble is part of what makes up the urban unconscious, and Picnoleptic City points to many of Åsdam’s concerns by giving literal linguistic definition to this notion that in subsequent work is more refracted.