Beyond Jenesien
Michael Hübl

A young woman on horseback. Upright, proud. Her stance is reminiscent of Joan of Arc. The only disturbing thing is that the rider is carrying a pitchfork instead of a lance or a halberd. However, it is held with a gesture as if she, the woman, had actually set out to defend her country, or at least her possessions. Further associations enter the picture. The long, flowing hair on her head could be an allusion to the legendary Lady Godiva, who roamed medieval Coventry on her horse and succeeded in getting her husband to lower the general tax burden. But the lady was naked, while the woman sitting in the saddle against an alpine backdrop is dressed in a white blouse, pink apron and dark, flowered dirndl, under which a sumptuously lined white undergarment peeks out. She is evidently wearing the kind of traditional costume worn by peasant women in the German-speaking Alpine region. And once again, historical references suggest themselves: The defensive bearing of the rider and the mountain backdrop behind her bring to mind the Tyrolean struggle for freedom in Napoleon’s era and Andreas Hofer, the leader of the insurgents, who became an almost mythical figure after his summary execution on February 20, 1810.

One problem arises from all these possible facets of meaning: they are somehow right and yet also not. This finding also characterizes the basic disposition of Gabriela Oberkofler’s works. She is the woman who had herself photographed on the back of a Haflinger in a still-image-like pose, thus demonstrating in an exemplary manner how she tracks down and thematizes discrepancies. Oberkofler activates moments of incongruity. She illustrates the deceptive interference between wishful thinking and reality, deals with the overlaps between instrumentalized romanticism and disillusioning reality, as they characterize not least South Tyrol, the land of her origin—also in the photo with the chestnut-coloured horse. The photo was taken on the Salten, a high plateau where Oberkofler grew up. You could call it a mountain village, but what images are attached to this term? Rural tranquillity, idyllic unspoiled nature? Lush meadows, happy cattle? Since 1937, Jenesien has been connected to Bolzano by the Funivia S. Genesio, and from then on at the latest, the remote village has become the suburb of a large city, analogous to the development that took place down in the valley: there, in the very years when the cable car was built on the Salten, the old trading centre of Bolzano was transformed into an industrial location in the course of the Fascist Italianization policy. Mainly mechanical engineering and metalworking were given production facilities in the Grande Bolzano d’Italia—“the novelty in the South Tyrolean economy, which was to shift its focus from the traditional sectors to modern Italian companies and orient it towards Italy”¹.

Against this backdrop, the photographic work showing Gabriela Oberkofler on horseback looks as if time has stood still. At the same time, it is unmistakable that this is not a document from a distant epoch, as the brilliant color quality alone points to the advanced 20th, early 21st century. The tension between tradition and modernity is manifested here not through props or other accessories, but through the medium of photography. The costume and landscape look as if they have remained untouched by historical development, while the type and quality of the photograph signalize that the image is a high-tech product. Thanks to the perfection with which it was realized, it would certainly be useful for the advertising activities of the tourism industry. But this, in turn, is a product of industrialization and thus an integral part of the tense relationship between technical and material progress with its standardization, regulation and rationalization on the one hand and the longing for a supposedly intact original and natural state on the other.

Gabriela Oberkofler’s work should generally be understood in this context. But it cannot simply be reduced to a contrast between yesterday and today, tradition or modernity. The photo installation Salten / Dolomiten (2008) in particular shows that Oberkofler is aiming for a higher degree of complexity in her work than it might appear on the surface. For despite all the historical associations and folkloristic accessories, the setting that the artist has chosen does not initially refer to the history or social restructuring of Tyrol, but to a position from the contemporary art context. Oberkofler paraphrases the video The Hero (2001), in which her colleague Marina Abramović, born in Belgrade in 1946, superimposes her own family history on the tragedy of the collapse of Yugoslavia. Abramović can be seen in a pacifist Amazon pose: sitting on a white horse, she waves a white flag and sings the national anthem of the socialist federal state.

In Abramović’s self-representation, reflections of private experiences overlap with reactions to the political routes. At the beginning of the 1990s, the artist realized that she felt the need to present her life and her work “in an autobiographical framework. ”² In The Hero, she now linked the horrors of her own childhood with the horror of the current present of the late 20th century, at the end of which the violent excesses that had marked its beginning flared up once again and which were generally assumed to have been overcome forever after the terror of two world wars. Abramović’s parents were actively involved in these battles as partisans. Their military way of life obviously had an impact on their daughter’s upbringing later on. Now, as a mature woman, a few years before her 50th birthday, this same Marina Abramović was confronted with the paradox of having to lament the collapse of a community that her mother and father had helped to build as high-ranking officials—two people she had experienced as brutal tormentors in her childhood and youth³.

You have to know this history in order to understand Salten / Dolomites and Gabriela Oberkofler's work in general. It is said of her: “Without question, the examination of home is of central importance for Gabriela Oberkofler's work genesis. ”⁴ And indeed, there is no lack of references to South Tyrol, the region in which the artist grew up. Not only in the saddle of a Haflinger, but also in the motifs of her drawings, installations and performances, she recalls her origins. There are the geraniums, for example. The popular flower decoration, which can be found time and again in the streets between Bolzano and Brennero, Silandro and Sesto, becomes the subject of drawings, adorns the reconstruction of a balcony and is even emblazoned at the center of an exhibition concept: “The geranium should play an important role ”⁵ was Oberkofler’s title for a show at the Kunsthalle Ravensburg. The artist took a similar approach with her work Ahnengalerie. Deer, Roe Deer, Goat, Cow (2008). There she combined drawings, which were inspired by a dusty and forgotten box of black and white photographs in the attic of her parents’ house, with hunting trophies and stuffed animals—also elements that are often associated with traditional Tyrolean folk culture.

Despite all the obvious and almost lovingly tender recourse to customs and cultural tradition, there is always another, painful side. Oberkofler does not indulge in naïve nostalgia. The subliminal allusion to the work and life of the avant-garde artist Abramović, who was socialized in Yugoslavia and has been internationally active since the mid-1970s, is full of explosive power. By adopting Abramović’s heroic pose from The Hero in Salten / Dolomiten, Oberkofler brings the image of a completely harmonious Alpine culture and way of life into the immediate vicinity of a conflict that has been smouldering for centuries. South Tyrol is, as it were, Balkanized, with the Balkans being a synonym for the suppressed, repressed or hushed up, often unresolved ethnic-political hotspots of Europe, where smaller ethnic groups collide with overriding national or nationalistic interests. These regions can become zones of acute violence—see Northern Ireland or the conflicts between Serbia and Kosovo, for example. Or, as of spring 2013, they can present themselves as areas in which the complex mixture of different opposites and unfortunate experiences has achieved a kind of balance and pacification—see Alsace or South Tyrol, for example.

Both have suffered some of the same traumas in recent history. For where Alsatians or Tyroleans defined themselves as German, after the National Socialists came to power they found themselves (often voluntarily⁶) under the influence of a regime that used the status of so-called ethnic Germans to fill the ranks of its own armies with new soldiers. One of Gabriela Oberkofler’s drawings is based on these recruitments and their bitter consequences. Based on an old photograph, it depicts the portrait of a well-groomed, probably still young man, who was certainly considered dapper during his lifetime: slightly wavy hair brushed back, a carefully kept moustache. The sitter was a great-uncle of the artist. One who survived the war. Of course, only because he had agreed to an identity swap. At the time, when the National Socialist German Reich and Fascist Italy were fighting over the status of the South Tyroleans, there was a rule that the first-born of a farming family should not be conscripted into the army; this was to ensure that the farming business could be maintained. But the eldest son from the Kreuzwegerhof was not particularly robust. His younger brother was different: he had the qualities needed to run a farm. So he took the place of the first-born—a man’s man, as some in the village probably thought. He, for his part, was drafted into the Wehrmacht, was taken prisoner in Russia and never returned.

But before his trail dies out, he sends fretwork home from Siberia. Filigree craftsmanship with bird motifs and Gothic ornamentation. The side walls, base and lid form a delicate little box in which the missing man’s sister has kept death notes over the years—the South Tyroleans call them “Sterbebildchen”. Gabriela Oberkofler has occasionally integrated these memorial sheets (valued by historians as sources of everyday historical research) into her installations, and the Siberian casket is also part of the collection of objects she uses in exhibitions. The memorabilia point like arrows of time into the past, from where so much of what is close and valuable to the artist comes, and where a number of things lurk that cast their shadows into the present. The idyll may not be deceptive at all, it is just ambivalent in itself: where innocence is emphasized, guilt is always included. This ambivalence, this interweaving of social, economic or technological factors and the decisions they force people to make, the moral dilemma into which they are plunged as a result—all this forms an important thematic strand in Gabriela Oberkofler’s oeuvre. She refrains from any one-sidedness, any rash partisanship. With her art, she focuses on what constitutes the beginning of all philosophy. Her approach corresponds to a fundamental amazement, as it could be articulated in the question: When the survival of a family is at stake, does it seem like an act of normality to those concerned to change the genealogical order for purely utilitarian reasons and send the natural heir off to war because the later-born brother is obviously better suited to dealing with what needs to be dealt with on a farm?

Such patterns of action, born out of necessity, are far less alien to Western, and especially German, culture than they first appear. In their “Children’s and Household Tales”, first published in 1812, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected quite a few episodes in which the cruelties described there have their origins in existential borderline situations. The best-known example in this respect is probably the story of Hansel and Gretel ⁷. The basic disposition of the fairy tale arises from a famine. The shortage prompts the mother (from the 5th edition of 1843 the stepmother⁸) of the brother and sister to take the rational and heartless step of abandoning their two children in the forest; the father acts as a weak-willed helper. When Gabriela Oberkofler exhibited her work at the Hospitalhof Stuttgart in 2009⁹, she explicitly referred to a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. She called her selection of works Blood in the Shoe. The three words alluded to the tale of Cinderella, as did the three white doves that Oberkofler had placed in a generously proportioned aviary to form the final accent of her installation Veilchen, Rose und Vergissmeinnicht (2009). The fairy tale of the humiliated young woman who is brought out of her ashen existence by a prince is not dominated by extreme hardship; it is about social advancement and a popularized version of the promises that the New Testament has in store for the poor and disenfranchised, for example when it is written in the Gospel of Luke: “Blessed are you who hunger now, for you shall be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh. “¹¹ Last but not least, the fairy tale proves to be a parable of what people are capable of as soon as it comes to their own advantage. After all, the blood in the shoe comes from the ruthless self-mutilation that Cinderella’s two stepsisters inflict on themselves just to attain the rank of prince consort.

Oberkofler did not refer to this plot anywhere in her Stuttgart installation, and she certainly did not attempt to follow in the footsteps of Ludwig Emil Grimm, who created an engraving of the story published by his brothers as early as 1825. There can be no question of illustration in Gabriela Oberkofler’s work. The title and the doves are the only direct references to the story, which has been altered many times and is set somewhere between kitchen dirt and castle splendor. But even there, the artist avoids too close an approximation to the literary depiction: the birds’ cooing phrase has been shortened (the original text reads “Blood is in the dirt”), their number has been increased (in the Grimms' work there are only two doves instead of three, which Oberkofler has integrated into her work).

The dove motif to which the artist refers becomes ambivalent in a twofold sense. On the one hand, with regard to the modifications made by the editors of the “Kinder- und Hausmärchen” in the course of the edition's history. In the first edition, the animals are victims for a moment, because in their vain irascibility the sisters destroy the dovecote from which Cinderella was watching the feast in the palace. This scene is already missing in the second edition of 1819, but a new ending is added in which the doves become perpetrators because they now act as a punishing authority: They pluck out the eyes of the haughty stepsisters. On the other hand, Oberkofler adds a further ambiguity in the form of the dubious reputation that birds from the Columbidae family have in Western civilizations today. Popular as fairytale creatures or symbols of peace, they are otherwise reviled by large sections of the population as “rats of the air ‘¹² and seen as a ’communal hygiene problem ”¹³. Oberkofler, according to art historian Annett Reckert, is dedicated to “a highly stigmatized species that has been alienated from its roots, whose legendary ability to bond and find a home has in fact become its undoing ”¹⁴. The ambivalent and always tricky relationship between modern consumer society and nature does not only occupy the artist in her installation Veilchen, Rose und Vergissmeinnicht—it recurs in large parts of her entire oeuvre because many of the questions that generally preoccupy Oberkofler are focused in her current treatment of natural conditions. These include the question: how far can change go without turning into irreversible damage and destroying what it has changed?

Gabriela Oberkofler conducted a remarkable experiment in this regard. During a scholarship stay in Valence, the artist bought a small cage with a turtle dove in a DIY store (French DIY stores stock a wide range of birds); it was to become the main protagonist of her work la tourterelle (2010). Oberkofler transported the animal to her studio, where she had already prepared a near-natural, one could say ecologically sound domicile for it—an airy birdhouse made of twigs and branches fixed with twine at the crossing points. More good deeds awaited the pigeon. It was loaded into the car together with its fragile farmer and driven to a wooded area. There she was to regain her freedom. And lo and behold: the turtle dove, which had remained silent until then, opened its beak and began its cooing song. But it did not fly. She wouldn't budge from her shell.

Oberkofler recorded this excursion, which did not result in a flight, with a video camera. She first brought the animal back to the studio and then back to the DIY store. The plan to remove a creature from the constraints of civilization to which it had been subjected had failed. Instead, a lesson was created about the fact that anthropogenic changes to nature cannot be reversed easily, on command or at the touch of a button, so to speak. Oberkofler illustrated the current scope of the concept of nature by placing her wobbly pigeon farmer construction made of branches on fruit and vegetable crates, for which there is a particular need in her home region of South Tyrol, where over a million tons of apples alone are produced every year. Both crates and cages are made of wood, a natural material. And yet the differences between the thin, stapled and printed boards at the bottom and the wickerwork of branches and twigs at the top are striking.

The problem that Oberkofler illustrates with regard to nature is also thematically extended to the social and cultural conditions of the present. For an exhibition at Museion Bolzano/Bozen¹⁵ , she recreated the bell tower and helmet of the church tower of St. Genesius as an all-round black, windowless object—like a three-dimensional shadow of the parish church of Jenesien, the village where Oberkofler grew up. However, the dark structure stood somewhat crooked in the Project Room of the art museum. The tower was tilted by 4.5 degrees, an inclination that was an expression of irritation and concealed a fundamental question: “The church tower is tilting—is that allowed for something that has always been in the middle, always formed the center? ”¹⁶ In other words: What happens when an order that has functioned for generations and has been familiar for centuries becomes unbalanced? When it gradually ceases to apply?

“Is the resolution already the new? “¹⁷ Oberkofler asks in continuation of these considerations. She herself answers neither yes nor no. Black and white painting is not her thing, but rather drawing with black and red. This color combination functions as a kind of basso continuo for her graphic work. Although she also uses blue and green, and occasionally even orange, in her sheets drawn in felt-tip pen, black as the basic graphic color par excellence and red as its antithesis, as a corrective, set the tone. If black serves as the color of the factual to record objects that are important to her, then red represents vitality values such as blossom and blood, pain or beauty. Red is the color of geraniums, the mountains behind the house, the girls’ headdresses. And it is a color of upheaval that sweeps everything away, as in the fox (2011), which seems to be burning from the inside, possibly exploding, or in the horse with blood flowing from its mouth in an untitled drawing (2012)—an event that was actually experienced, as Oberkofler reports¹⁸.

The fact that she created an aesthetic monument to this suffering creature is reminiscent of that enigmatic January day in 1889 when the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche “sobbing and tearfully embraces a Turin carriage horse that he believes has been mistreated” ¹⁹; Fēdor Dostoyevsky describes a similar scene in his novel “Prestuplenie i nakazanie” (Guilt and Atonement) published in 1866²⁰. But in Gabriela Oberkofler's work, the drawing fed by compassion is not based on a spontaneous emotional impulse, but on a fundamental attitude. She neither stylizes the fractures, wounds and losses that Oberkofler registers as consequences of advanced modernization processes into striking accusations, nor does her work suggest that art has quick, instant solutions at its disposal. Rather, Oberkofler focuses on healing, on reparation—as in la tourterelle or in the large-format drawings over two meters wide, in which she meticulously captures the carcasses of insects, birds and other animals, including a hedgehog and a fire salamander, in watercolour painting.

Often it is only fragments, a few wings, the torso of a bumblebee, to which the artist devotes her equally careful and respectful attention. The fragmentary nature of such body remains emphasizes how futile the measures completed with brush, pencil or as an action ultimately are: The pigeon remains in its unfree state, and the dead certainly do not come back to life. Of course, this futility is part of the program. Oberkofler does not aim for the illusion of a repair, she does not strive for an obsessive harmonization of contradictions and inconsistencies. Rather, things are the other way around. Precisely where she gives the impression of merely cultivating the customs of the ancients, she shakes up perceptions, confuses conventions and subjects them—with a friendly smile, but actually provocatively —to unreserved scrutiny. The artist even penetrates the remnants of the Catholic Church, whose rites and ceremonies many regard as guarantors of unchanging traditional values, declaring Hochzeit - Wir haben geheiratet (2006) or playing hide-and-seek with Father Müller in front of the confessional and on the pulpit (2009). The only difference is that the hands are not held in front of the face as a sign of penitent contemplation, but as a prelude to playing hide-and-seek, and that the two brides in their magnificent white dresses are obviously indulging in highly officially sanctioned polygamy: after all, as a series of photos shows, the two festively dressed-up women were joined in matrimony by six suitably decked-out men.

It’s funny and humorous, but not a joke and certainly not a denigration. It is a test of seriousness and non-seriousness. Because in times of divorce rates, which at around 30 percent in South Tyrol are moderate compared to a neighboring country like Switzerland (over 50 percent), but are also on the rise there²¹, the romantic image of marriage as an institution is as endangered (and dangerous) as the postcard view of an idyllic mountain village with a church tower in the center of town. The work Hochzeit—Wir haben geheiratet can therefore be read both as a plea for a deeper seriousness towards the covenant for life and as an opportunity to reflect on whether it will be necessary in the future to try out alternative models, even if it is the marriage played out photographically by Oberkofler to eight.

Here it becomes clear once again that ambivalence, this key concept for Gabriela Oberkofler’s work, does not stand for dazzling ambiguity, but for the awareness that things usually have at least two sides and that, if they get mixed up, they cannot be dealt with using simple or even simple-minded recipes. This can then mean guarding one's own without being too wary of the foreign, for example by hanging a close-up of two riders in traditional South Tyrolean costume printed on fabric on a teahouse on the island of Büvükada, which is regularly frequented by Turkish cab drivers (Prinzeninsel Istanbul, 2009), thus building an ideal bridge between two regions. The enriched state of consciousness that is constitutive for Oberkofler also includes the willingness to mistrust mere probability and to at least give the impossible, the supposedly hopeless, a try: When she took up a scholarship at the Edenkoben manor house, Oberkofler claimed, in a variation on the Gospel of John, In the beginning was the cherry blossom²² , placed a strong branch of a cherry tree with several branches in a room of the estate and hung it with cherry pits. For Oberkofler, they were aggregates of stored experience and uninterrupted continuity: “You can see from the cherries what they have experienced ”²³.

Almost 110 years after Anton Čechov ended his last drama with the cutting down of a cherry orchard, famous for its splendid blossoms, and made it clear that everything past and traditional has lost its validity, because from now on only the principle of capital-relevant rationality of purpose will determine the rhythm of existence—a long century after the premiere of Čechov’s socially critical comedy “Višnëvyj sad” (The Cherry Orchard), Oberkofler’s Edenkoben installation seems like a signal of departure. Like an invitation to rethink what was once considered new and progressive. Not to blindly fall back into the old, but to get closer to the core of what is appropriate for a good, successful, sustainable approach to the world and people. Beyond Jesenia, beyond all tradition. 

1 Rudolf Lill: Südtirol in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus. Constance 2002, p. 158; see also p. 110f. and p. 115.
2 Thomas Wulffen: Performance. Reflections on Marina Abramović's Biography, in: Marina Abramović. Biography. Ostfildern near Stuttgart 1994, pp. 67-71, here p. 71.
3 On her mother's brutal parenting methods, see Marina Abramović: Small Stories c. 1970, in: Kristine Stiles et al. (eds.): Marina Abramović. London 2008, pp. 199-121.
4 Jörg van den Berg: durch nichts wird mehr, in: Jörg van den Berg et al. (eds.): Gabriela Oberkofler - geblieben sind die Orte die dich sahen. Berlin 2012, pp. 13-21, here p. 17.
5 Exhibition at the Kunsthalle Ravensburg / Columbus Art Foundation October 10, 2011 - January 27, 2012.
6 As far as South Tyrol is concerned, see Lill, Südtirol, op. cit. p. 179 or 213 ff.
7 Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Children's and Household Tales (=KHM), no. 15.
8 s. Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbuch zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. Berlin / New York 2008, p. 34.
9 Exhibition at the Hospitalhof Stuttgart September 18 - October 18, 2009.
10 KHM Nr. 21.
11 Lk 6,21.
12 Court does not grant license to kill pigeons, dpa/N 24 01.09.2011 17:33, s. http://www.n24.de/news/newsitem_7210029.html, last accessed 19 March 2013.
13 ibid.
14 Annett Reckert: In einem Haus, wo eine Taube wohnt, in: Helmut A. Müller (ed.): Blut im Schuh, catalog for the exhibition at the Hospitalhof Stuttgart, 2009, no p.
15 Exhibition in the Project Room of the Museion Bozen/Bolzano November 30, 2012 - January 10, 2013.
16 Gabriela Oberkofler in conversation with the author on March 11, 2013.
17 ibid.
18 ibid.
19 Curt Paul Janz: Friedrich Nietzsche. Biography. Munich / Vienna 1979, quoted from the paperback edition, Munich 1981, vol. 3, p. 34.
20 cf. Janz, Nietzsche, op. cit. p. 35.
21 see for example stol.it (=South Tyrol online): Ehen in Südtirol: Erfolgschance bei 70 Prozent, http://www.stol.it/Artikel/Chronik-im-Ueberblick/Lokal/Ehen-in-Suedtirol-Erfolgschance-bei-70-Prozent, or Landesinstitut für Statistik ASTAT: Eheschließungen, Scheidungen und Trennungen, http://www.provinz.bz.it/astat/de/bevoelkerung/eheschliessungen-scheidungen-trennungen.asp
22 s. Trägerverein Herrenhaus Edenkoben e.v. (ed.): In the beginning was the cherry blossom. Edenkoben 2012, in particular pp. 4-6.
23 as note 16.