“The Obituary Project” I Hope Tucker I Artist in Residence 2013

“The Obituary Project” was the final presentation and screening by Hope Tucker, artist in residence 2013. The American artist transforms what we know as a daily form of narrative through “The Obituary Project”, a compendium of moving image that gives new life to the antiquated documentary practice of salvage ethnography. She has animated cyanotypes of downwinders and instructions for making fishing nets by hand; assembled archives of correspondence that document the impact of industry; photographed shuttered bread factories, fallen witness trees, and decaying civil rights era landmarks; recorded mobile phone footage of the last public phone booths of Finland; and written the text of a video out of paper clips, a Norwegian symbol of solidarity and nonviolent resistance. Works from the project have screened in festivals, museums, and galleries all over the world.

In 2013, Hope Tucker was an Artist in Residence at Vogtgasse, back then the current location of studio das weisse haus. As an artist motivated by an interest in acts of resistance and environmental justice, when she arrived in Vienna she was drawn to the shuttered nuclear power plant in Zwentendorf an der Donau. Tucker spent her residency studying Austria’s relationship to nuclear power and the public outcry and protest that began a move towards the abandonment of nuclear energy. Tucker poured over microfilm of Austrian newspapers before the referendum at the National Archives, watched material at the Technical Museum’s Media Center and at the Film Archiv, visited the Technical Museum and the small reactor at the Atomic Institute, and climbed down several sets of ladders to peer into what would have been the reactor pool at Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf. The opportunity to spend an extended time near AKW Zwentendorf and in the city that had a significant impact on the vote against nuclear power helped her project flourish. Her obituary Atomkraftwerk Zwentendorf will screen in 2018.