December 3 2025

A photo, a story

by the EPOPS team

The artwork on the facade of the Georg-Emmerling-Hof* is a contemporary installation inspired by the 1973 French cult film of the same name, Themroc, directed by Claude Faraldo and starring Michel Piccoli.

The film tells the surreal and subversive story of a factory worker (played by Piccoli) who rebels against his mundane, conventional life. In a famous act of liberation, he takes a sledgehammer and knocks down the outer wall of his apartment, transforming his living room into a cave open to the street. He then throws his furniture out the window and begins to live like a modern urban caveman.
A photo, a story
The film tells the surreal and subversive story of a factory worker (played by Piccoli) who rebels against his mundane, conventional life.
The sculpture on the building depicts this very scene—the jagged hole in the wall with the figure standing ready with a hammer—paying homage to the film’s themes of breaking free from social constraints and transforming a typical apartment into a space of radical freedom.

The artists designed the figures to resemble social realist sculptures from the 1920s or 1930s (the era of “Red Vienna”), which often confuses viewers into thinking that this is a historical monument dedicated to labor, when in fact it is a contemporary reference to anarchy and 1970s cinema.

* Georg-Emmerling-Hof, district 2: Leopoldstadt, Vienna

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