Horsing Around at World Design Capital Frankfurt RheinMain 2026
As part of World Design Capital Frankfurt RheinMain 2026, a Trojan horse filled with Viennese design made its way into Frankfurt. Together with Tisch 7, the cult bar Gute Stute became a stage for installations, performances, music, food and plenty of surprises. Also on view was Kai Linke's Passionswege project, presented for the first time in his hometown. An evening that showed just how playfully design can cross borders.
As part of its 20th anniversary, VIENNA DESIGN WEEK embarks on an Anniversary Tour across Europe. Through temporary interventions, collaborations, and unexpected encounters, the festival makes stops at selected locations — one of them being Frankfurt am Main as part of World Design Capital 2026.
At the invitation of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK, the Viennese collective Tisch 7 takes over Frankfurt’s iconic bar Gute Stute for one evening. Under the title Horsing Around – Don’t Hold Back, an intervention unfolds between installation, social space, object, and performance.
A Trojan horse is coming to Frankfurt — not to conquer the city, but to smuggle young Viennese design into it. Selected objects from Gute Stute were brought to Vienna, transformed by Tisch 7, and returned to Frankfurt as hybrid artefacts. Throughout the evening, these objects are activated, used, altered, and collectively experienced.
Somewhere between irony and sincerity, a temporary situation emerges in which design becomes visible as a social process — shaped by appropriation, interaction, and shared experience. The evening is complemented by food, drinks, music, and spatial interventions.
Tisch 7 is an interdisciplinary collective based in Vienna consisting of Valentin Bauer, Lenz Dreher, Theresa Pöschl, Valentina Lian Sturn, and Leon Theodor. Working at the intersection of design, art, and space, the collective develops projects that deliberately resist easy categorisation. Their practice is site-specific, playful, and process-oriented, focusing less on finished objects and more on transformation, use, and collective experience.
Also joining the event is Frankfurt-based designer Kai Linke, who will present in Frankfurt for the first time the project he developed together with Schnitzstube Stadlhofer as part of the Passionswege programme at VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2025.
The detailed handout here.
Kindly supported by LOBMEYR, Gumprecht und Ramsa, Funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport, Section IV – Arts and Culture. Supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum Berlin.
