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The artist Veronika Burger deconstructs archives, reassembles them, makes possible voids productive. Through this process, the archive transforms from a passive store of knowledge to an active production tool, to an unfinished, constantly expanding structure that does not distinguish between documentation and fiction. The archive itself acquires a physicality that produces and reproduces, remembers and mediates, translates and documents – performs.

Veronika Burger’s work, consisting of a video installation and an app with an embedded archive, is part of a long-term artistic research project. It explores the question of how resistance has manifested itself in the movements of workers and how these gestures are passed on across generations. In her artistic work, Burger is looking for ways to translate these gestures into a new queer-feminist visual language. 

To do this, she has focused on a particular activity that, although directly related to the visibility of the workers’ movement, has mostly remained in the background and been carried out by women: The production of red paper carnations – the central symbol of Austrian social democracy. Already for the video work The Working Body As An Archive | The Archive As A Working Body from 2019, the visual material collected by the artist was updated and restaged. The archive of working gestures created in this way has now been further developed for the app entitled Red Pinks!.

The app invites users to participate in the constant expansion of a resistant movement database. Individual video recordings of one’s own hands performing a memorised activity can be fed into the archive. 

By means of similarity analysis, the archive or library function of the app makes the videos recorded and saved by users available to other users. The app sees itself as a dynamic, performative extension of an archive – as an archive platform for performing, collecting, processing and discussing work gestures.

At the same time, Red Pinks! also functions as a kind of training tool that reinterprets militant, resistant patriarchal gestures into those more subtle, almost invisible signs of workers’ self-empowerment – from raised fists to graceful finger play.

Text by Georgia Holz