Robert F. Hammerstiel (Austria)
Private Stories II
All the photographs in this series were taken at the Blaue Lagune. The Blaue Lagune is an estate of more than a hundred different prefabricated houses south of Vienna. In the unoccupied show-houses, visitors and prospective buyers find interiors completely furnished in every detail, the aim being to motivate buyers. Poses, gestures and postures, signs of intimate privacy, to which every observer can relate, are staged in this ‘public’ home by Robert F. Hammerstiel. What irritates is the fact that without background information the location cannot be defined, so it could be a real home or a staged film-set. The series of photographs is meant to be understood as a discussion of the authenticity of places and gestures.
Alles in bester Ordnung IV
The installation called “Alles in bester Ordnung III” served Robert F. Hammerstiel as a stage-set for his video production Alles in bester Ordnung IV in which four actors show everyday, constantly recurring, activities in a kind of “father-mother-child role-play”. Types of pictorial and body language are used here, such as are common in television advertising, reproducing a family idyll. The repetitions, which were really filmed, were repeatedly cut one after the other, thus trenchantly uncovering stereotyped patterns of behaviour.
