Colour, Sound, 3 min., 1999

Photo Series Colour, 2006

Love-Age alludes to the English word lovage (originally ‘loveache’), an herb, which is also associated with the Maggi spice, a condiment from the fifties. The video is about Gabriele Dertnig, the grandmother who – after her daily dosage of the TV soap opera “Rich and Beautiful” at the old people’s home – dreams of meeting her lover in the woods. In the English translation the granddaughter who was living in New York at the time tells the dream of her grandmother. In this version the reciprocal influence of a cross-generational relationship of two women is transfigured through that of the media that reflect a society in which the sexual wishes of older people are repressed and made a taboo. An accompanying photographic series links the past with the present: The rooms of the grandmother’s former bed and breakfast inn that have hardly been changed (her grandmother who as an independent business woman represented an important aspect of post-war alpine tourism) mark the ruptures lying between the private realm and the public one of tourism.