Misha Stroj :
Denkmal für die Wassermühlen

The Water Mill Memorial alludes to the history of the Schmidatal valley as well as to its current use as a recreation area. The elements of the monument are situated along a path — gearing, cog wheel canopy and lamp, as a direct allusion to the machines and the renewal of the protective roof to a roadside shrine — as a mosaic-like reconstruction of the vanished water mills of the Schmidatal. At the same time the memorial also references the tradition of sculptural garden adornments. As an artwork in a designed recreation area, the mill memorial is a 'terza natura' in the sense of Italian Renaissance garden theory, with moving visual axes and subtle changes in the intensity of the design of the intervention in the natural setting. Quotations are inscribed on the sculptures that relate to the use of energy. The combination of the subject matter of the images with the text, the view and the reference, leads to a new quasi-cryptic knowledge that requires deciphering by the viewer. Mechanical force and aesthetic power are closely related. The inscriptions stand for an intervention long past, the extraction of an element from nature for use, and so bring the artistic character of the memorial closer to that of the landscape surrounding it. The Water Mill Memorial transforms its setting into an emblematic garden, it marks the artificiality of the area and emphasises the leisure culture that leads the visitors to it and which has followed the demise of the mills.
(Eva Kernbauer)