Kollektiv Neonpink

Revealing the landmarks of women’s history: a reparative intervention and an audio walk 

Washing places. There are so many of them. And there were even more along various rivers, canals and streams. Throughout history and over the centuries, they were places of mostly invisible women’s work. We still find some of them today, such as the six washing places that the collective neonpink has rediscovered on the bank of the Mühlbach and placed in an artistic context. These forgotten ways of reaching the stream, be they the steps that lead down to the water, the concrete platforms or the wooden jetties, have been partly renovated, cleaned and made accessible again. 

In parallel with these restorative gestures, the purely female collective neonpink has composed a partly fictional, partly documentary audio walk that essentially tells the story of the Mühlbacherinnen. 

The audio walk enhances our culture of memory by adding the story of these women. The “Mühlbacherinnen” were women from the neighbourhood, aunts, grandmothers, friends and young girls. Whatever the weather, they carried their laundry to be washed in the Mühlbach before returning with the wet load for drying: the bedclothes from their own families and homes but also, in the case of maids or servant girls, the laundry of middle-class households. These were women who symbolised a society, who carried out exhausting physical work that we have labelled as care and reproductive work since the 1990s, performing invisible tasks that facilitated historical and political change. 

By telling the story of these female voices, which have hardly been addressed in St Pölten in scientific or socio-historical terms, the collective is highlighting unequal structures, while also empowering their audience and inviting it to understand the extent to which such structures still shape society today. 

The central thread of the narrative runs along the Mühlbach, meandering between historical classifications, the everyday stories of contemporary witnesses and a relationship with the present. 

The metaphysics of water, of which both people and the planet are largely composed and which gives life to all living things, can also help us to understand a key aspect of our own biography. These impulses are intended as an invitation that we are free to accept or not. The collective investigates aspects of “washing” or “cleanliness” as a means of opening up discussion of feminism, the fluidity of the body and other views of history and the self. 

On the days listed below it is possible to experience the live tour of the partly renovated washing places as a group, accompanied by the collective. 

The various locations are accessible and the audio walk can be downloaded for the duration of the festival via QR codes at each location.

The Neonpink collective met in its current line-up for the first time at Sonnenpark 2023. Six women, who have different relationships to St. Pölten and come from different walks of life, came together through the production "Mühlbacherinnen", an audio walk as part of Tangente, a festival for contemporary culture.

By working on the women's historical perspective of the washerwomen at the alluvial points of the Mühlbach, they thus also researched their own identity as a collective, as well as that of their ancestors, and recognised challenges, complexity and the need for change.

In doing so, neonpink does not claim to be absolutely truthful, but rather abstracts and mixes historical events with biographical stories from contemporary witnesses.

Many of the narratives are still reproduced today.

With this audio walk, they therefore scrutinise the facts and highlight the past. It is an approach and an offer to explore one's own layers through history.