BEING.OLD. Art in public space is a joint project by artist Robert Fleischanderl and the Franziskusheim, Fügen. The exhibition BEING.OLD enables the residents of the Franziskusheim to appear in public as an organization.

The theme of care homes for the elderly is becoming increasingly relevant in society. State statistics have determined that in 2010, 16.4% of the Tyrol’s population was over 65. As soon as 2020, it will be 19% and in 2030, 23.7% of Tyroleans will be older than 65¹. By the year 2050 the group of 75-year-olds in the Tyrol will have risen by 232 per cent².
Permanent improvements to medical care lead to a longer life expectancy and the period of life gained in this way is regarded as positive, as long as it can be experienced actively and in good health. “The negative side of this development is indicated by the fact that the risk of becoming ill rises exponentially with increasing age. Suffering from several illnesses simultaneously (multimorbidity) is characteristic of great age, often leading to the need for assitance and care.”³ As a consequence of these facts, in future an increasing number of senior citizens will spend the last years of their lives in sheltered accommodation and care homes.

The photos by Robert Fleischanderl tell of people and their lives in a care home for the elderly, inviting us to examine the subject. Age, self-determination, dignity, isolation, sexuality, loss of control, illness, death etc. are thematized. They provide clarity of information and hopefully reduce some prejudices. The residents permit insights into the living rooms which they have designed individually, embedded in an environment inviting the opportunity for a self-determined life despite various age-related limitations.

BEING.OLD pursues the aim of bringing different and spatially separated works closer together. It is an interaction between the residents and staff of the Franziskusheim, their visitors, and the population of the upper Zillertal and the neighbouring Inntal. It is an artistic intervention into people’s everyday space, a spatial and thematic crossing of boundaries.

The photographs are not a documentation. They are statements about people, processes and situations. The works evolved through a combination of the documentary, responses to what was found, and a conceptual staging that is more or less pronounced according to the subject. The outcome are autonomous images, which employ frequent borrowings from art history in their function and structure. The artist embeds the people, objects and situations pictured in occidental iconography, so to speak, when the photographs’ composition, use of lighting or colouration is reminiscent of famous works. For example, we find citations of the rasters of modern and contemporary art as well as so-called cellar lighting, an invention attributed to Caravaggio, or typologies from religious art such as crucifixion groups usually showing Mary, Mother of God and the disciple John beneath the cross. Hand studies appear to have been carved in stone, and some portraits are suggestive of character heads. One man gazes critically into the mirror after having a haircut and shave: he seems to like what he sees. Some people are completely self-absorbed. Others take part in what is going on, like a woman wearing glasses who looks confidently at the camera, reminding us of self-portraits by Renaissance artists. One woman in her bed is reading the Tiroler Tageszeitung. Her pose is similar to that of Carl Spitzweg’s poor poet. On the one hand, Robert Fleischanderl refers to habits of vision that convey, in their subtext, how the realities of life in care homes are now something quite everyday; on the other hand, he creates distance via the staged analogies in the depictions. Distance that originates in his respect for the people depicted.

Even without art-historical knowledge, the images prompt reflection, and the mindfulness with which the artist has approached the theme is passed on the viewers. For example, the key role that relatives play in the lives of the residents becomes clear when, for example, we see a small altar on a bedside cabinet with figures of angels, flowers and a candle – a reminder of a husband, when one photo brings the extended family into the room, or a wedding picture is hanging above the bed. Some images, like the one in which a woman peers out from among her considerable collection of cuddly toys and dolls, ceratinly make us smile.
In June 2013 the works, large-format photos measuring 100×140 cm, were shown in the Franziskusheim, structurally adapted into a gallery. Parallel to this, six subjects were shown on 8 large posters in an outside exhibition in the Upper Zillertal and neighbouring Inntal.
The care home as a public place becomes a gallery. This intensifies the interaction, and the viewers are invited to consider and reflect upon the works and their themes.
The neighbouring communities represent a counterpole to the exhibition in the Franziskusheim itself. The photos on the posters intervene into the population’s everyday life, and a spatial and thematic crossing of borders takes place. They cause an irritation in the structural routine of community life; insights are offered, and the viewers are invited to encounters.