I almost recommended a Christmas song, given how close we are getting to that territory, but I could not quite bring myself to do it. Maybe next week. This week’s pick is The Barrel by Aldous Harding, a New Zealand recommendation and one I will happily claim as such. The song moves in an unusual way, circling rather than progressing, returning to the same images and gestures until they begin to feel slightly altered. It is playful, strange, and just a little unsettling, as if it knows something you do not yet.

There is something intriguing about how the song resists resolution. It does not build to a payoff or tell you how to feel. It just keeps circling, which makes it a good match for a week driven by intuition. If you are between plans, between thoughts, between years, this is a good place to be for five minutes.

This week’s Creators Thursday brings together natural winemaker Viktoria Schödl and contemporary artist Simon Kubik to explore the shared language between natural wine and contemporary art. Both work with living materials, intuition, and chance, trusting process as much as intention. Curator Julia Harrauer will guide a conversation that moves between disciplines, asking how creators learn when to intervene and when to let a work unfold on its own terms. The evening is curated by HEIMAT’s Ruby Wallen and hosted at the One Month Concept Store by EDARA and Julia Skergeth

The night begins with a guided tasting of three of Viktoria Schödl’s minimal intervention wines, followed by the first full reveal of the limited edition Schödl cuvée label designed exclusively for this event by Simon Kubik. Only 200 bottles will be released, available to purchase on site, with Simon signing bottles bought on the night.

This one is less “group show” and more “a life’s work in hosting.” It is built around the collection of Dagmar Meneghello, a Croatian gallerist and collector who spent decades turning Palmižana, a secluded bay near Hvar, into an island academy. Not a residency in the grant-application sense. More a long-running open invitation: artists, writers, musicians passing through, staying, making, leaving behind objects and stories that eventually became a collection of over 3,000 works.

Schaum der Tage translates that idea into an exhibition context. Works are not organised chronologically or by medium. Painting and sculpture sit together like conversations rather than categories. The reference to Boris Vian’s Froth on the Daydream is less literary than practical: space here responds to emotion, intimacy, and human presence.

Opening: Mon Dec 15, 18:30 doors, 19:00 opening
Where: Künstlerhaus Factory, Karlsplatz 5

If the week already feels unmoored from linear time, Belvedere 21 is leaning into it. The evening pairs two films that approach time from opposite ends and arrive at roughly the same provocation. Ein Quantensprung in der Zeitmessung starts in the world of scientific precision, where time is sliced into ever finer units and measurement becomes almost devotional. Brute Force moves in the other direction, treating time as something felt, repetitive, and unstable, where progress stutters and meaning is rarely tidy.

Together they make a neat third-week-of-December argument: the clock can be exact, but experience never is. And there is something reassuring in the implication that everything is already in motion anyway, that the future is not waiting to be reached so much as already unfolding. You may as well lean in and enjoy the ride.

When: Thu Dec 18, 18:00–20:30
Where: Belvedere 21, Arsenalstraße 1, 1030 Vienna

I know we keep saying we dislike Christmas markets and then keep recommending things that resemble them anyway. But some do actually hit different, and this is one of them. For the first time, the MAK garden turns into a design-led winter market, organised with POPCHOP and Salonplafond, which already tells you most of what you need to know. Urban, curated, zero kitsch, with a vinyl-only DJ programme and a line-up of Austrian designers selling things you are still likely to respect next week. I could almost recommend it blindly. I did also pop by this weekend, so I guess that makes it a 20/20 vision recommendation.

There are edible and drinkable comforts too of course. If you need a break from the cold, your winter market ticket doubles as an excuse to step inside the MAK and warm up among the exhibitions. When you’re back, go say hi to Billy from Charles Ingver and pick up a couple of bottles of his handcrafted spirits for your cellar. Then step next door for a lemongrass punsch - it’s excellent.

When: Fri 12–Sun 14, and Fri 19–Sun 21 Dec, 12:00–21:00
How Much: €4 entry including one drink (free with a same-day MAK museum ticket)
Where: MAK Garden, entrance via Fritz-Wotruba-Promenade

If you have made it through the third week of December without completely losing your sense of time, this can be considered a reward - actually two rewards on consecutive days.

First up is on Saturday - Cucina Itameshi Vienna is hosting an afternoon built around two simple pleasures: freshly shucked oysters and Pet Nat at the correct temperature. Perfect for anyone who needs this loophole to finally go to Cucina, because very few are organised enough to actually get a reservation there in December. Expect oysters cracked by Matthias Zykan, Vienna’s most notorious oyster shucker, and sprudel by Katharina Gessl, specifically her Pet Nat “Barawararin”, a bottle-fermented pét-nat from Zellerndorf in the Weinviertel made from Grüner Veltliner and Gelber Muskateller. It runs from 13:00 to 20:00 - making it suitable both as a late lunch and an early evening stop.

And because good things tend to come in pairs, and 2025 has been generous with the plot it has provided so you deserve a reward or celebration for that too. On Sunday, next up is the about-to-open Mastercut Listening Bar in 1070. Oysters (obviously), and Pet Nat (Obviously) this time from our friends the Schödl Family, food by Mochi x Matthias Zykan, and a vinyl-led afternoon built around rare Japanese pressings. Perfection.

Sat 20 Dec, 13:00–20:00, Cucina Itameshi Vienna, Praterstraße 70, 1020 Vienna, no reservations
Sun 21 Dec, 12:00–20:00, Mastercut Listening Bar, 1070 Vienna, no reservations

Vienna-based artist Simon Kubik works across painting, objects, and installation, combining intuitive, conceptually charged gesture with a practice that invites the viewer’s own perception into the work. I got to know his work more closely while preparing for Creators Thursday Vol. IV, and it quickly became obvious why it resonates. There is patience, skill, and ocassionalyl his a sense of humour slips through. If you do not know his work yet, consider this your recommendation to change that.

Kubik is currently in New York for an exhibition. His works were unfortunately briefly held up in customs which caused his opening to be postponed, gifting him an unexpected stretch of time to enjoy the city before installation began, which we heard was exactly 300 squats worth. In case you happen to be in New York over the next few weeks - do pop by.

The only difficult part about working with Simon: when sending options for the label they were all too good and each with a beautiful and thoughtful concept and meaning behind. This made the process to choose long and difficult - and we enjoyed every moment of it. We went through more than twenty options and honestly any of them would have been more than the right choice. This one was my personal runner-up, purely because the meaning behind it and the way Simon described it was very touching and gave an insight into his outlook on life.

He described the phrase as something he feels often, and something that quietly informs his work. It names a feeling that arrives unannounced, usually mid-walk, when a rush of admiration for the world around you suddenly takes over. “Ich saß da, und mochte alles was ich sah.” In English: “I sat there, and liked everything I saw.” The concept was simply this line set on a white background on the front of the label. Writing this now, I realise I have fallen back in love with that design all over again. The chosen one is perfect too, of course. Which probably just means we will need a part two. Or twenty.

You cannot manufacture that feeling. You can only make room for it - this week, we hope you all get a few of those moments.

The most special places to share a drink might not be a bar at all. This week’s bar crush is my neighbour’s living room. I have become close friends with my 82-year-old neighbour, a relationship that began with hallway chats and turned into afternoon teas at my place, dinners at hers, and the occasional trip to the theatre or a musical performance together. And on days when whoever is in charge of good fortune feels particularly generous, there is a knock on my door and a homemade Persian meal waiting.

She is one of those people who makes you realise how much life can fit into a single address. Originally from Iran, she’s lived across Greece, Switzerland and Austria - in the 70s she worked as a travel agent and travelled all over the world, collecting stories of adventures and wisdom that only can be earned through life experience. Her living room bar is a small archive of another life too: a collection of her late husband’s spirits, brought with her from Switzerland when she moved here twenty years ago. She has generously and officially given me the task of helping her work through it and how could I refuse? As she puts it, her door is always open for an aperitivo on my way out.

Consider this your seasonal reminder to get to know your neighbours. You might be living beside a whole life’s worth of stories and hard-won wisdom and not know it yet.

And no, you are not invited to my neighbour’s living room. Well, not all of you. Maybe a few special ones can come with me one day.

There is a shop window in the Freihausviertel filled with dolls and teddy bears sit arranged like a slightly haunted salon, waiting to be repaired, redressed, and returned to service. The place is Puppenklinik Reichel on Heumühlgasse, run by Manfred Reichel, who has been restoring dolls and soft toys here since the mid-1990s. He has said of his work: “Every doll that comes onto my table tells a story.” In other words, these are not objects to be replaced, but biographies to be continued.

That logic lands in the third week of December, when everything around you insists the solution is always an upgrade. This little atelier proposes the opposite: repair, not as nostalgia but as a different relationship to time, one that values continuity over replacement. Reichel describes what the work demands with a line that feels made for this week: “For that, I gladly go searching even for the most impossible things.” He is referring to tracking down parts that no longer exist in any normal supply chain. However it does also nod of disposal culture, a belief that objects, like people, can be carried forward with care. Not everything can be saved, but some things can, and often should.

And a final practical note: do not, under any circumstances, walk down Heumühlgasse alone in the dark.

Puppenklinik Reichel, Heumühlgasse 5, 1040. Hours: Mon, Wed, Thu 10:00–16:00, Fri 10:00–14:00 (closed Tue, Sat, Sun)

I first met David from PilzePoint in their early Naschmarkt days, when they were still finding their rhythm among the regulars of my weekly farmers’ market circuit. Since then, they have become my most reliable source of fungi in the city. Vivi is at the Naschmarkt stand almost every week, generous with advice and unfazed by indecision, while David appears when his schedule allows, which is increasingly rare for good reason. Between an ever-growing market calendar and the fact that word has travelled through the culinary circuit, he is now supplying some of the top restaurants in Vienna.

I should also admit that I’ve barely branched out: I tried the lion’s mane on my first visit because I was instantly drawn to it, and David gave me a fantastic “cook it like a steak” recipe. Since then, I haven’t managed to pick anything else. As always - for the recipe you’ll need to show up yourself and ask yourself - in the spirit of getting more conversations going.

We’re fascinated by how these things grow and, in the spirit of proper curiosity, are planning a visit to their production site to see where it all actually happens and get the full, unfiltered details of how these fungi are cultivated. More on that soon.

To continue our December series of sweat crushes that don’t involve actual exercise, this week we’ve taken it further. This one doesn’t even involve sweating. It involves freezing. Yes, Taiga, which we suggested last week, has a cold plunge. A very good one - as well as cedar-scented and gently lit. But a cold plunge in the Donau is exactly what the doctor ordered this week, when you are still close enough to the year’s end to wrap up what you do not want to carry forward, but are not quite released from it yet. The river has a way of cutting through that limbo and making the clarity you may have been trying to avoid, unavoidable.

Expect time to behave differently in the river - four minutes can feel like an actual eternity, which is very on theme with this time warp of a week.

A few rules: Bring hot tea. Don’t get dressed too quickly afterwards. Let your body remember how to regulate itself without assistance. You’ll leave with that rare December sensation: the mind quieter, the senses sharper, and the feeling that time has stopped hovering and briefly snapped back into focus.

Where: A short walk along Am unteren Alten Donau will present several modest wharfs - pick your poison - the choice matters very much less than the act.

Literature

Written in the early 1970s and published in 1973, Água Viva is one of Clarice Lispector’s most acclaimed books. It refuses plot, chronology, and explanation, unfolding instead as a series of immediate thoughts and sensations. Lispector called it neither novel nor essay, but something closer to a voice thinking out loud, testing what language can hold before it hardens into meaning.

She also happens to be useful when you are in the yearly negotiation between wrapping things up and letting a few threads hang. Água Viva does not argue against closure, it just refuses the panic version of it. “I want to seize the present,” she writes, as if to say: finish what truly needs finishing, but do it from attention, not from pressure.

And then it offers a second permission alongside the first. “It is not a story. It is not a novel,” so you do not have to treat reading it like another task to complete. Keep it within reach like a good coat. Open it when you start trying to force meaning out of the week, read a page, close it again - simple as that. Lispector reminds you that conclusion and clarity are not identical, and that what you choose to leave unfinished can be as deliberate as what you decide to close.

And that’s all I have for you for this week. Wishing you open hearts, the clarity to know what to close this week before it gets dragged into the new year, and at least one moment where you can say, as Simon puts it so well: “Ich saß da, und mochte alles was ich sah.”.

Oh, and a very, very good week ahead.

See you next Sunday,
R

Ruby Arabella Wallen tracks the city’s pulse, observes its culture and characters, and works with a small circle of her personal muses to create you a weekly Sunday Dispatch - your blueprint to the week ahead in Vienna.