Mixed Feelings

The Hofmühle is a historical building dating back to the 16th century which has been left untouched in its original state. The artists, in investigating into its past, came across a number of stories about the previous occupants and their lives. Different accounts were given about some of the episodes concerning the miller and his daughter, depending on who was there to witness them or who related them. The house certainly gives rise to many speculations. Ricarda Denzer did a piece of work called "eigen" (peculiar) about one episode taken from the daughter's biography. "It was back in 1974. There was this story about a man. A letter arrived, not handwritten. Just individual letters cut out. It said: on such and such a day at such and such time the mill will blow up. The police came and father and daughter were evacuated. But nothing happened." A projection area was raised in front of the old mill to stage a video animation of an event announced 30 years earlier. This time, the mill duly blew up. Billboards similar to those near construction sites were then put up which showed the site the mill had stood/still stood on. All she heard from her father all life long was, "watch out, he doesn't want you he is only after the mill!"

Ricarda Denzer's second work is a 13 minute video which starts with view of the village and then slowly approaches the mill, focuses on it until it explodes and then comes to a stand-still with almost static pictures taken from the computer animation. Spectacular scenes of smoke and mist not unlike those created by phantasy computer games. Voices from the village talking about a woman who is different, has a different way of speaking, behaves differently, who doesn't want to or is unable to fit in - maybe she is sick - a woman marginalized and ultimately shut out. The voices are mixed with the voice of a commentator recounting brief episodes from fairy tales the woman had collected in an old textbook.

Hilde Fuchs produced a series of installations called "Reflektorzone" (reflector zone) which consist primarily of marches and processions. The project refers to events in a village community which typically take place during church holidays, with special emphasis on processions and pageants. People in motion are set off against rigid structures and installations such as the holes dug along the sides of the road at regular intervals which are filled with birch branches during the Corpus Christi procession. They are used only once a year yet they are found throughout the village along the route the procession normally takes. In her installation, Hilde Fuchs used the holes to stand up raw birch loges the height of road pillars with red and white reflectors nailed to them. Photographs of various processions, both old and new, were placed on the cut surfaces of the poles. At the Kaufhaus Gruber a show of slides depicting historical and present day processions in the village was presented alongside a series of pictures taken recently of people's facial sections (the eyes of locals seen through the rear mirror of a car). The point was to compare the act of walking as a ritualised, collective movement to the act of driving as something individualised. The two opposites, i.e. the ritualised collective and the individual, the walking and the driving, were set off against each other throughout both installations. Additional focus is placed on what people perceive as they drive by or gaze on/in.

Oliver Hangl drew on the unusually keen interest of the 900 soul community in cultural productions (of their own) to create his "Reinswood", which he developed in several parts. The success of productions like his is due in large measure to the multifunctional skills of some of the village's inhabitants (in their capacity as artists and organizers outside their jobs). Hangl simply decleared Reinsberg a "place of artists" for the duration of the exhibition, turning it into a stage for collective and individual performances. In a first step, he has the letters "REINSBERG", 5m high and 30m long, mounted on the castle hill Hollywood style. He then goes on to stage a kind of casting in the church square. People from the village arriving in their Sunday suits are made up and styled to pose for a shooting. How does a village prepare for public appearance? With flower orgies organised by the society for the improvement of local amenities, folklore competitions, women's caps knitted in gold, suits, make-up, posing on their tractors, posing with their cows? What media are used to transmit such a performance? (gold caps on the Internet?) Oliver Hangl operates at the crossroads of theatre, film and visual arts. He creates his performances with the help of actors and musicians, and tries to link elements of film and theatre - focussing on visual details and switching between space and time to create the kind of immediacy of expressive gesture which is unrepeatable. He stages artistc glimpses of scenes which the audience is invited to enrich with the clichés and fictions of their own identity. The construction and perception of these images are examined by means of the various media - film, video, music, entertaining multimedia live acts, selected according to the situation or context described.

"Schneckenfalle" (snail trap), a performance by Barbara Kraus, also had its origins in the stories around the old mill. However, the discussions about the mill eventually led the artist to change her mind about a woman she was originally going to create with the material she had come across. For her performance she came up with a hybrid between snail and human being, a metaphor for the ambivalence of desire. "The desire for circumstances that are dry, ordered, clearly defined and comrehensible, in contrast to the appeal and fascination of damo, slimy-slippery, dark holes." (Barbara Kraus) The figure thus created was seen in the streets of Vienna days before its appearance, it came to Reinsberg before the opening, attended the Reinsberg nights, a village festival which took place at the same time, and then as night fell, appeared before the audience, having previously been announced on TV. Shrieking sharply it pushed its way to the speaker's desk, its gestures full of sexual connotations. Surrounded by luscious lettuce plants it began to preach about the "church's fear of women", using a language reminiscent of antiquated threatening speeches. In the second part of the performance, the snail withdrew into a house made of leaves, slipped out of its previous role to read out texts and protocols about the treatment of women during the inquisition and the persecution of witches. All this was performed in the village square in front of the church which was part of the reason for the heated discussions and strong reactions among the local population both during and after the event. It was no longer the project, the works, the nature or content of the performance they were concerned about, but the daring costume, the sexual connotations of the gestures and the obvious attacks on the church.

"die Burg, die Kirche, das Gasthaus und ..." (the castle, the church, the village inn and ...) was produced by Rita Vitorelli specially for the village of Reinsberg. The first impression she had of Reinsberg was that of a village without billboards. She then went on to find out more about a handicraft typical for this alpine area, the painting of qwooden shooting marks. What advertising and painted marks have in common is their idealisation of reality. Creating the illusion of a better world and questioning the one we have are also elements inherent in the act of painting. Rita Vitorelli's painted plates depict the "Sights" of the village - the castle ruin, the church and the village inn. Her exasperation with presenting something purely for the purpose of tourist maraketing is expressed in her paintings. Some of them are completed, others are only sketched out, done carelessly or left deliberately unfinished. The pictures miss their porpose, they disillusion. Procedural representation is a quality of painting which Rita Vitorelle refers to more and more in the course of her work. "Mixed Feelings" provides both the formal basis and the content matter she draws on. The location she chose for her plates in a meadow at the entrance to zhe village is suggestive of a number of things: is this new development territory, are these new buildings sites which at a second glance turn out to be well-known chlichés? Is this a new advertising strategy being tried out, that of presenting "the sight" of a village before the actual village?