Creating freedom: Vanessa Hafenbrädl's video mapping

Created: 05/20/2022Updated: 05/20/2022, 10:50 am

By: Susanne Greiner

With her video mapping, Vanessa Hafenbrädl bathes the Künstlerhaus Gasteiger in a new light.

© Greiner

Utting/Holzhausen – Space is not common property.

The so-called public space is also owned: in that of the municipality or the state.

The Dießen light and video artist Vanessa Hafenbrädl wants to reclaim this space.

To occupy it with art and thus make it public again.

"Ultimately, it's about freedom," she says.

The 42-year-old shows how this can work with a 'light walk', a video mapping in and at the Künstlerhaus Gasteiger.

The lake glistens behind the meadow.

And a projector that casts its light over the blossoms of the willow plantain onto two tree trunks.

The projection: an image by the illustrator and commercial artist Emma Wirth.

She is one of the artists who lived in the Holzhausen artist colony in the late 1940s.

Numerous illustrations testify to her project at the time, a children's book.

The protagonists of their story: insects, their life and suffering, with a hospital in the toadstool.

The book was actually supposed to be published in 1948 – which didn't happen.

It was probably too expensive.

Hafenbrädl reactivates one of Wirth's pictures, throws it into nature - and lets a new insect, a drone, buzz through it.

"I want to make the spirit of the place visible," she says.

And of course that includes the people.

The fact that Hafenbrädl focuses primarily on the local artists reflects their commitment to equality.

In Holzhausen, too, the women are in the background.

For example Anna Gasteiger, whose flower still lifes often take a back seat behind Mathias Gasteiger's sculptures, which already greet guests as deer figures at the entrance to the site.

On the facade of the house and in the Art Nouveau salon, on a centaur and behind a chandelier, two of her works come to life again.

Hafenbrädl applied them to a hand-blown glass body through which the projector light shines.

Mouth-blown means uneven: the picture flickers, smears, dances: it moves.

Hafenbrädl developed this glass itself.

It's her way of bringing history to life.

In the drawing room, she also takes advantage of the antique flat glass mirrors that reflect the projection and seem to turn into liquid glass via the sparkle of the crystal chandelier on the wall.

Glass runs in the Hafenbrädl family.

One of her ancestors was a foundling who was found on a board in the "Glass Harbour" - Hafenbrädl was born.

The fact that he later ran a glassworks increases the significance.

The fact that the still lifes, which are broken up by technology and a contemporary artist, are accompanied acoustically by a plaice sound collage by the Munich artist Anna McCarthy, also brings the 'Scholle spirits' into the present - and supports Hafenbrädl's intention to synaesthetically “through maximum aesthetics the perspectives of the viewer " to expand.

With the pond mapping, the light artist not only expands the perspective, but also the space: a screen wanders into the projection of a light grotto;

Figures 'dance' at the edge of the screen;

Lines fray the surface of the water, simulating rain.

In the acoustically grafted background, swarms of birds call, frogs croak and it bubbles again and again.

Parallel to the pond, a spider's web of light lines slides over the adjacent house wall, broken up by vertically flowing high-rise facades.

Public room

One would like to stay in this place, listen, observe.

Gladly all alone - even if it's nice that numerous curious people found their way to the Künstlerhaus for the premiere of the video mapping as part of the district culture days (additional funding from external bodies) on Thursday last week.

In the house and in the garden, small groups form that evening, conversations and laughter murmur through the area.

The room, property of the Bavarian Palace Department and thus of the Free State, is public.

And the history of the artist colony comes alive again.

Vanessa Hafenbrädl is now one of them.

This evening, Friday, May 20th, the video mapping will take place again from 9 p.m.