Rachael Woodson

Rachael Woodson’s work Strange Sisters ventures into the realm of the imaginary. The point of departure of this project and its anchor points are the poet Georg Trakl’s grave at Mühlau Cemetery in Innsbruck (unable to cope with the war, he took his own life in 1914) and documents on Trakl kept in the archive of the journal Der Brenner – whose publisher Ludwig von Ficker ensured through his commitment and dedication the posthumous endurance of Trakl’s literary legacy in the German-speaking world. Strange Sisters construes a tremendously subtle resonance space for Trakl’s writing, in which the artist literally creates projection surfaces for the poet’s expressionist verses and counterbalances his synesthetic use of colours using the obsolete analogue technique of chromogenic print processing. The transition in Trakl’s texts from day to night is reflected in Rachael Woodson’s colour fields, which shift fluidly from light to dark reds, to purples and blues. They are the material ground upon which in terse excerpts Trakl’s words have been photographically superimposed. For other montages, the artist incorporates documents from her family archive, photographs of her own sister, and juxtaposes them with documents and photographs from the Brenner Archive’s loose bundle of Trakl documents. Strange Sisters relies on the associative space of the viewer, on the knowledge about the fatal impact that Trakl’s sister Grete had on him, which seems to be confirmed to posterity by her later suicide. At the same time, the title can also be interpreted as a commentary on the way the mediums of photography and film are used here. The accompanying video is based on a montage in which sequences with archival elements, in which the real past of the poet is inscribed, are intercut with the absolute present of his texts. Here, for example, the artist films young students in comparative literature reading Trakl texts aloud, and in the end, she herself steps into the frame holding the camera. A travelling shot out the window of a moving train brings us back to an Austria of the here and now.

Florian Ebner, If Innsbruck Were No Longer Just Innsbruck (excerpt), Genau Jetzt! exhibition catalogue, FOTOHOF edition, 2023.