wfliegendehunde

Flying Dogs / Fliegende Hunde

Flying Dogs is based on in-depth research on the architecture of the current location of das weisse haus (Hegelgasse 14) and the former use of the building between 1885–1962 as a Female Teachers‘ Training College (Lehrerinnenbildungsanstalt) and deals with the importance of the (political) figure of the female teacher for the Austrian feminist movement of the time.
Flying dogs is an installation composed of 130 cement tiles, a hard-cover bound printed text and two overhead projectors. The juxtaposition of industrial materials in the exhibition space of das weisse haus underscores my ongoing interest in the intertwining of the immateriality of gendered labor with attempts to materialize a glitching modernism.
The tiles are all hand made through artistic appropriation and domestic adaptation of techniques of hydraulic tile manufacturing and they display „flying dogs“ embedded in an ornamental pattern. The dogs are taken from a report titled Unterlehrerinnen (I guess it could be translated to Subteachers or Underteachers), published in Vienna in 1889 in the feminist newspaper Dokumente der Frauen. This article depicts the precarity of teachers‘ education and of the teaching profession under a feminist prism which clarifies the links between work precarization, classicism and the maintenance of women‘s subaltern position. The article focuses on the mandatory two years of unpaid work young women had to undergo between their studies and the moment they could start working as teachers. Fliegende Hunde (flying dogs) was the slang already employed teachers used to describe these young women.
The way the tiles are installed responds to the room architecture. One hardbound printout with a reproduction of the text Unterlehrerinnen is casted into the tiles. The installation is lightened by a set of former school overhead projectors.
I am looking at the teacher profession and its role as a representative form of female labor and as a profession around which Austria‘s feminist movement was centered at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. By focusing on the publication Dokumente der Frauen and the activities of the General Austrian Women‘s Organization (Allgemeine Österreichische Frauen Verein) – the most left wing of Austria‘s feminist movement at the time– I am looking to convey in my work a set of tensions between a certain euphoria of the modernist turn and the counter- narratives of the local women‘s struggle.
By understanding this feminist movement lead by teachers like Auguste Fickert as a struggle towards collective emancipation, I see in Flying Dogs a migration into the Austrian context of my ongoing research upon moments of social upheaval and processes of transgenerational transference of memory. I am interested in how the concept of nostalgia drifts between expressing the bounds of collective memory and privatizing history, in the sense that it tends to be perceived by a longing subject as the expression of an individual desire towards an imagined past. Also in this work I deal with nostalgia as an expression of desire that is always intertwined with the affective dimension of remembrance.

Text by: Ana de Almeida

Flying Dogs, Cement tiles, ceiling jacks, steel plates, hard-cover bound publication
Installation view, das weisse haus, Vienna (2022-2023 AT)
Photo: Klara Schnieber

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