Regina Hügli: Traisen, She / Her
What defines the Traisen and its industrial streams? What emerges in the current interplay of interactions between flowing water, groundwater, landscape, weather, people, infrastructure, flora and fauna?The approximately 80-kilometre-long Lower Austrian river Traisen, which rises in the Limestone Alps and flows into the Danube, is highly regulated and intensively used. Among other things, the Traisen feeds two factory streams in the St. Pölten area and drives numerous turbines. In recent years, it has experienced new interventions in the form of renaturation projects.
On the trail of the hyperobject “Traisen”, Regina Hügli’s research materialises in a photographic contribution to this book. She deals with the visibility and invisibility of what constitutes the Traisen and its mill streams, and with how they are perceived, used and how the spaces they create are reshaped. The research is inspired by the concept of hydro-logic (according to Astrida Neimanis), which enables a new ontological understanding of bodies and community. “Traisen, She/Her” is based on photographic observations along the river and on conversations with people who live or work along the Traisen, use, transform or research her.
As difficult as it is to step into the same river twice, it is even more difficult to portray it and to capture what constitutes the ephemeral, dynamic, visibly and invisibly acting entity of a river.
Regina Hügli, born in 1975, is a Swiss photographer and artist living in Vienna. Water, watersheds and bodies of water are her main focus. In her work, she uses experimental means as well as documentary and investigative methods. With her association ONE BODY OF WATER, she is also active as an organiser of transdisciplinary projects and activist ventures. In 2023 she received the Austrian Neptun State Prize for Water in Art.