a photo and sound project by nurith wagner-strauss

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They were born between 1915-1935 and were young girls or still children during the Second World War. They come from different social backgrounds, some from an urban, others from a rural environment. Some are physically and mentally fit, others are already frail or demented.

Nurith Wagner-Strauss

"For this work I portrayed and interviewed Austrian women born between 1915 and 1935. The faces of very old women have always fascinated and touched me in equal measure - these faces in which life has marked itself - where joy and sorrow, happiness and grief, crying and laughing have left deep traces. There is a fullness of lived life in these faces and they radiate something so soft, delicate, fragile, vulnerable that I find beautiful. It is naturally a different beauty than that of the thoroughly questionable and illusionary advertising aesthetics. We are incessantly flooded with images of young, smooth faces that want to suggest that youth and beauty are inseparable. And this despite the fact that demographic trends clearly show that our western society is ageing more and more. Women at the age of 50 or 60 at the latest are gradually becoming invisible and women in their last two decades of life at all marginalised and disappearing from our consciousness - and yes, actually in old people's or nursing homes and similar institutions, are at most still perceived as a problem.

When the idea for this project matured in me, I immediately had the vision of double portraits - and that one of each of the portraits of the respective woman must be printed on glass, which radiates something fleeting, ephemeral and which I perceive as a metaphor for the inexorably approaching removal of the soul from the body. But the arrangement of the two pictures is also a symbol for the existence of these very old women "between worlds", where they perhaps already catch a glimpse of another world in certain moments...

At the same time, it was clear to me that I wanted to capture the women's stories - stories from a time that is so completely different from ours, and which would otherwise be lost forever. The stories of these 23 women, who come from the most diverse social classes (there is the farmer, the doctor, the worker, the teacher, the scientist, the housewife, the artist, the writer and many more), tell of happy childhoods, hard work, expulsion, flight, loss, deprivation, of unrealisable career aspirations and of war experiences - which have a frightening topicality again.

Each of the women tells her individual biography and together a kind of collective biography emerges, a biography of that time - from a woman's perspective. Women's stories are only documented and heard in a few cases - although they have carried, borne and endured so much. It was and is a great concern of mine to make them visible and audible. (Notes on my latest project, which I am continuing to work on as long as there are still contemporary witnesses among us)."

Excerpt Calliope _ Join the Dots