weiss auf weiss, 2015
Die Klauberinnen vom Rabenwald
In the eastern part of Styria, a rural region of Austria, a talc mine lays hidden upon a hill. Still in use today, it has been excavating and processing the white mineral, which is used for a wide variety of purposes ranging from paper manifacturing, cosmetics and synthetic fibre processing. Untill the 1990‘s local women used to sort the rocks according to their degree of whiteness defining the quality of the product.This job was physically very hard, but constituting one of the few possibilities to get work for women outside of agriculture or family.
The research project started in 2013 when regional festival komm.st took place in Anger, a small town near Rabenwald, where the mine is. A research room to get in touch with former talc sorting women helpd to establish first contact. Over the course of two years I could conduct several interviews with former workers and gather information and photographic documentation to help preserve the memory of the female impact on styrian mining history. The collected data was than published in the book 'weiss auf weiss – Die Klauberinnen vom Rabenwald' combining text, photographic and graphic work set around the historic and contemporary conditions of female work in rural regions.
Published in cooperation with edition mono.
