Daniela Tagger

(Vice-chairwoman of ugatra)

Reflective Biography

I was born in Salzburg in the mountains. I grew up in Kaprun, a little tourist-village with about 3000 inhabitants.

There I lived with my parents in a flat until I finished the technical school for building construction in a city about 30km away from Kaprun.

The general values from this area are typical austrian tourist-village-values.

If you go some kilometers up you will find a different behaviour from the people in the smaller villages. There is a lot of classification and wealth-frustration in the “rich villages”, I would say. The “representational-value” is still very important. A big, expensive car and a good looking house with nice flowers makes the people work a lot, which is beneath sports very necessary to have a good status.

There are only a hand full of people from outside of Europe living in the area permanently, they are not always well integrated, because a lot of cliches in the society are working against them.

The gender roles in our generation are quite various, but you can find much more traditional family-structures as in a city.

Traditional mainly looks like: the woman is taking care of the children and the house and likes to talk about intrigues with (or about) the neighbours and the man works alot and afterwards needs a lot of beer with his football-friends.

My Educational and Work Background

I started in Kaprun with the primary school, then I went to a musician and creative secondary school in Zell am See. As I allready wrote, I made my exam at a technical school for building construction in Saalfelden.

In the first year of this school I promised to myself to go to the other side of the world for one year as soon as I have my final exam. So I did, and spent a year full of freedom, nature and simple life in Australia. I would say I was very lucky to do this, to find my own values, which have nothing to do with materialism like the society in Austria and the media from everywhere tried to let me know.

When I came back to Austria I went to Vienna and wanted to study photography, because I wanted to do something with art and also had the idea of a traveling life. The class at the University for applied arts has just been recently founded and I went there quite naive with my workmap.

They didn´t take me and I chose to study architecture at the Technical University. For one year I liked it but then I found out how versatile and exciting the Art-Education-classes at the University for Applied Arts were.

Since 2002 I study Textile and Art and Communication. There are a lot of interesting things to study. I´m allready in the fifth year and still want to learn a lot.

At schools I mostly engaged in “textil-mobil”, a project from our textile-class, touring through Austria with the intention to bring the textile-theme closer to the schools and make it more popular and interesting.

My artwork

My most interests are art-projects which addresse the problems of society. A strong personal point is act against racism.

(When ever it was possible I traveled as long as possible. Countries from which I learned most about values, which our western society has mostly lost, were i.e Indonesia and Georgia. In these “poorer” countries the life at most times has an other richness, the people need to help each other and it’s normal.

For me its important to learn about other cultures directly from somebody from this culture to really understand something. Here in Vienna I also get to know alot of interesting people to whom I love to talk and find out new things for me.

If you ask me what I learned in school about other cultures, my answer is very poor and this is something I would like to change in our school-system, because I think it’s very important for pupils to get in contact with foreign people to prevent racism.)

So, back to my artwork...hmm its quite difficult for me to describe my own works, I also cannot say that I´m very specialised in one field or category.

Maybe because I never wanted to get putted in a drawer, and also because everything is quite interesting for me.

To put some works in the wiki I figured out one strong line, which I´m following up.

It’s about combinations from different medias, for example textile and performance and video.

I tried to find 3 fotos out of hundreds which could be interesting for you. When I find some time I´ll make a web-log and send you the link to see more about my works.

I chose 2 photos from Agnes and me in different, but linked performances and 1 photo from Jasmina and me in an other performance.

You see: I`m not an artist who exists in artistic loneliness, I like working with other people most of the time.

For the ugatra-workshops I would like to go into this direction - I´m waiting for influence!!