Sans titres, 2009 - 2015
Diainstallation / Prints

“Ma Mè re was a very aCtractive woman, and has a hook small nose.“ I wrote that about my mother when I was seven. Calling her ACTtractive was correct in so far as, at the time, she was the owner of a club called VANILLA, and in the salon she ran there, liberty had a decidedly frivolous ring to it. Those were, after all, the years of the 1968 movement and revolution was, first and foremost, tantamount to open sexuality. Accordingly, at the Vanilla, people celebrated the VANILLA VAMP ROMY SCHNEIDER PHASE which, at the same time, represented Ma Mère's “phase of sexual liberation.” The Hotel Orient, a kind of uptown hot-sheet hotel, became our second living room of sorts. The birth control pill had just been invented, sex with any and all was an in thing, and between the sheets people eagerly sought to free themselves from bourgeois and puritanical constraints. In those days, Ma Mére donned electric blue satin pantsuits à la Marlene Dietrich with a puckered red lips brooch on her lapel. Ma Mè re saw every revolution as intrinsically linked to its expression in fashion. Of course, I thought that what was in it for women wasn’t necessarily just liberation – but I belonged to a different generation. Later, Ma Mè re sewed a kilt from all the sweaters her lovers had left behind. For quite some time, this kilt served as a bedspread for my crib – I thought it looked hideous.

Ma Mére’s nose, by the way, was and never got small. It was later slightly surgically altered, purportedly due to breathing trouble, a few wrinkles were removed in the process. Fashion was the gateway to the world. Fashion meant being part of the cosmopolitan world of the glitterati, even if you didn’t have any money. Fashion came directly from Paris, insiders in VIENNA were far, far ahead of their time. When Ma Mè re went on business trips as a young woman, for instance as a beauty consultant with Revlon, she would save her expense allowance (meaning she went hungry) and rather buy some “cool rags” instead. Ma Mè re wore red when it was the fashionable color. When she sauntered down theKärntnerStraße,theuniformlydressed,blackandgreycheckeredcrowdwas confronted with SIGNAL RED. When red was en vogue in Vienna two years later, Ma Mè re, of course, was long wearing silver with shepherd's check. When she had the money, she subscribed to Elle and Vogue, when she didn’t, she simply stopped paying for them.
We ran our hands over chenille, pleats, alpaca, organza, cashmere, crepe, and silk at the flea market. Pulling a synthetic fiber dress from a heap of clothes? That was out of the question; Ma Mè re met the idea with scorn and disdain. This was her “Ecoles de Material.”

She later needed money to pay off her ex-husband’s debt, he was a Mafioso and a “twist dancer of the third kind.” He had gone underground in time and had left Ma Mè re standing there with a mountain of debt. What now? She sold “Clinique” sample cosmetics products, actually not for sale, to her friends. Some won’t even talk to us to this day. In those days the samples were large, enough to keep you going for quite a while. She advised women who visited the beauty shop and looked like they had little to spend, “Don’t buy all the expensive stuff, Nivea is fine, too, they’re all made from the same ingredients.” Her cosmetics boss held Ma Mè re in high regard but at some point, he had obviously concluded that she was too smart for this line of work. She was sporting a Burberry suit, orange colored hair clips, and a pageboy along with matching lipstick when he walked in one day and affectionately suggested she should get a better job. Ma Mè re changed her plans, and henceforth, her new passport listed her job title as “illusionist.”
In Italy, feminists wore lipstick. In Vienna they donned beat-up purple overalls, without a trace of makeup. Ma Mè re became a feminist early on, under one condition: with lipstick and in style.
Ma Mè re wore Roman sandals that laced up over her knees with a pantskirt, and she did so even though her calves were fairly stout. She matched this with a violet-colored batik coat. She was quite a formidable appearance!
A pantskirt and a denim suit were imported for me from New York; back then, all girls still had to wear dresses. It was not fun to stand out in this way in school, to be the odd one out, but I was thus counted as a bohemian – wearing a different outfit every day, always suited for the occasion. Nothing was ever superficial, everything was sophisticated down to the last detail: be it all in black with only a red rotes wristband, shepherd’s check with paper coffee filters, or mixed petit point and crepe. An old jacket was whipstitched by hand, the inner lining was turned inside-out, the older clothes were, the more precision was invested in their treatment. There were no fashionable aberrations and not one excess ounce was tolerated. Bodies of the same age were subjected to critical scrutiny and snidely remarked upon: “Not a wrinkle, but what a belly.” Later on, during my punk rock and new wave phase, she commented drily : “In Italy, even punk rock looks great, not so in Vienna.”

Sometimes we used to stand in the street, both the same height, same blond hair, equally strong – one with a pink-colored shawl, the other with a dark red one, both shawls interwoven with gold – and scuffled with each other. The shawls had been imported from Tunisia, our temporary domicile, where we had four blind German shepherd dogs that were supposed to save us from the Tunisians. Groups of men on bikes rode up behind us and yelled “Hey, how are you!” until we were finally able to escape into the boutique where I worked at the time. The gay shop owner’s thirteen year-old nephew tried to kiss me (I was fifteen) in the changing room, until I blew my top off and hit him everywhere I could with such force that he was bruised all over. So I already knew how to tussle, and we stood on Mariahilfer Straße with our Tunisian shawls and did just that. Passersby couldn’t decide who they were supposed to help – we were equally strong. Later we were invited to appear in a TV series on mothers and daughters – all the others faired fine and made nonchalant appearances in front of the camera: Oh no, never any critical relationships, with them, everything was in harmony. Then it was our turn, and I guess we made quite an authentic impression. We argued and screamed our heads off, but we did make a stylish appearance – I in my new- wave look and Ma Mè re in her Italian feminist outfit. We prowled around our chosen Vivienne Westwood, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana pieces for weeks until we could finally buy them in the sales, at prices that were still pretty steep. And each of these precious pieces were then tweaked and fine-tuned – a friend of hers simply added a silkscreen to an Issey Miyake skirt, because Ma Mè re had deemed it too boring.

And then there were Ma Mé re’s colors: turquoise, ultramarine, carmine, ochre, sun yellow. Matched with checkers, stripes of all kinds, dozens of shoes, one pair often in four different styles and colors. All were my size... And scarfs – not a few, no, but hundreds, made of silk, wool, cashmere, and the really soft “you know, that cashmere from the woman in Switzerland.” And pashmina (I didn’t know that) from India, which even in India had cost 400 Euro, in a thousand colors, as always. Ma Mé re’s wardrobe was like a museum and her credo was: Wrinkles can often be covered up with textiles. The more wrinkles you have, the redder you should paint your lips, the more elegant your outfit should be. When she had passed away, her collection was divided up among her friends, we ran around in our underwear and tried on and picked from her hundreds of pieces. Sometimes a think of a special piece of her clothing, I still have some of them, and I think, that would fit me perfectly today.