Ghost city
Final text to Becoming Writing: Navigating Art through the Written Word, a workshop lead by Louisa Elderton at the Salzburg International Summer Academy
2025
“My last check-up reveals nothing: pointless. So I treat myself to a trip — my body is in a bad place and I need to breathe a little. It’s my lungs again, which as you know are restless rocks always hardened and pouting amok. Especially in this heat. So instead of waiting it out, I grab the keys and toss myself from the door into the open street.
The train leaves early. I buy a one-euro croissant at the supermarket; it’s soft and light and easy. Tourists wander through the wagon clumsily searching for their seats. It says online that the sound installation is set right in the ruins. As far as ghost towns go, Salzburg doesn’t strike me as too depressing. I even enjoy its white sombre- ness. People were still living there among the rubble up till the thirties, finding shelter in tomb-like caves. Eventually the government relocated everyone for sanitary reasons. Time itself abandoned the city along with its inhabitants, leaving Salzburg as a limp body, the dust slowly eating it away.
The bus from Linz to the ruins is packed and I am gurglingly nauseated. Upon reaching the visitor centre I walk down to the river. It’s pleasantly windy, paragliders fly between the peaks framing the valley’s few remaining buildings. The bones of the medieval fortress glint above the town, its white walls crumbling by the mountain side. This is where Oskar Kokoschka’s proto-hippie commune was founded a century ago. The artists painted the city’s skin with scenes of idyllic beauty. Some of the murals still remain; Ingeborg Bachmann wrote a poem about the whole thing at some point. Perhaps they were seeking purity — or just some fresh air, I guess.
A predefined route zigzags through the rubble of the ruins — the present is here, the past there — like my mind shying away from unpleasant thoughts. Time takes mineral shape in the heaps of stone and broken steps and pale sycamores growing from the roofs of houses. The atmosphere is crystalline. I walk past a flock of tourists into a sunny square and the sound finally reaches me. It’s the air itself, which blows through a scattered system of hidden pipes. The art comes like a whisper, a low, warm humming interrupted by tiny gasps and gurglings. I listen, alone. It carries with it voices in waves, curving around the ghost space of cracked baroque churches.
Did you know it wasn’t the quake that killed Salzburg but the fires that followed? I press my right hand to my chest, feel my way up the breast to the sternum and the collarbone to the back of the neck. I cast the gaze down this crumbling chest of mine. My eyes stop at the white shirt. It is filled by the breeze, empty.”