Warum Glas?
Hans Georg Hafenbrädl gründete im 18.Jahrhundert die erste Hafenbrädl Glashütte.
Der Name Hafenbrädl stammt vermutlich vom Glashafen ab.
Hafenbrädl begibt sich im Sommer 2019 auf Ahnenforschung im Bayrischen Wald und macht berührende Funde.
Hafenbrädl ́s waren im 19. Jahrhundert erfolgreiche Spiegelglasfabrikanten.
Durch das „Drama von Ludwigsthal“ geht der gesamte Besitz verloren:
Nach dem Tod von Ihrem Ehemann Wilhelm Abele heiratet Elisabeth Hafenbrädl, den "Kavalier" Hans Streber. Dieser lebt in Saus und Braus. Er geht ein Verhältnis mit Ihrer Schwester ein und verführt nach dem Freitod von Elisabeth Hafenbrädl deren Tochter aus erster Ehe. Diese wird schwanger und bringt sowol sich als auch ihr Kind um.
Beim lesen dieser Ereignisse im Archiv des Glasmuseum Frauenau entstand der Wunsch diese Geschichte künstlerisch emanzipiert zu bearbeiten.
Hierzu erhält Vanessa Hafenbrädl 2020 ein Stipendium der Alexander Tutest Stiftung.
Videomapping und Glas erwecken die Protagonisten zu Leben.
Video&Glass Installation:
'Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer. Had I not killed her she would have killed me'. The term coined by Virginia Woolf sets the tone for Vanessa Hafenbrädl's delve into the past and her family's glasswork owner history in the Bavarian Forest on the border to Czech Republic.
Her personal and historical portrayal focuses on generations of women in her family, their struggles and oftentimes premature deaths, and is told through a haze of warping of light and glass, imitating the complexity of memory patterns through form.
Using a raw piece of optical glass heated unto explosion, created in a series of experiments, at the legendary glass workshops of Bildwerk Frauenau in the Bavarian forests during her recent scholarship there, Hafenbrädl projects live-camera portraits of her sisters and daughter and ancestral oil paintings, through the rotating rough blocks to distort and fragment these stories of womanhood, in an aspiration to break and crack cliches physically and conceptually in a radical manner.
The accompanying sound and text collage by artist and musician Anna McCarthy underlines this notion with a hypnotic multi-layered mesh of field recordings and textual historic, as well as contemporary assemblages. The German, Englisch and Czech spoken word recordings are based on real historical accounts of the glasswork owners Hafenbrädl. Using samples of glass harmonicas and glass harps, which were traditionally also built in the glassworks, these fade in and out of the space, like in a derelict ballroom of times gone by, adding to the atmospheric dreamlike sensation.
The finished installation is an ambitious and longterm work mixing traditional glass techniques with contemporary approaches in medium and content.