Werner Kaligofsky. 47°26’47.70’’N 12°32’27.28’’E

Who does the land belong to? A couple of years ago, on one of my trips to Tyrol, I noticed that an entire hill was missing on the other side of the valley, opposite my parents’ house. It had somehow disappeared, complete with flora and double-chair lift. As if a bomb had exploded there, leaving a giant crater on the horizon—viewed from below. ‘They’re building a lake up here, to provide artificial snow for the ski slopes,’ was the answer I got from the locals in reply to my look of total disbelief.

Werner Kaligofsky

Kaligofsky has also interspersed additional motifs into his reservoir series. From one on the television screens in a Salzburg tourist office he photographed two children posing for children’s fashions. In addition, he published an online ad posted by a Brazilian company that markets its products under the label Tyrol; and, by way of an abstract counter-figure as it were. He also used the photograph of a tv screen in a Salzburg hotel that featured the grid-covered user interface of a software program that displays room lettings and restaurant table reservations. As a fourth theme—not least as a reference to the globalized codes of everyday apparel and camera poses—Kaligofsky added a series of portraits he initiated and then had photographed under his instructions by a young Iraqi refugee called Raad al Abbas, depicting the residents and staff at accommodation quarters set up for refugees in a former hotel on the lake of Schwarzsee near Kitzbühel: in each case the names of those portrayed and the country codes of the their countries of origin provided the titles for the portraits.

Excerpt from text by Silvia Eiblmayr