Last month I attended an event called A body is a body is a body at The Cube presented by Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF) of short films by avant-garde/experimental Austrian female filmmakers.
The highlight for me was the screening one of Mara Mattuschka early films from 1993 called S. O. S. Extraterrestria where she plays a godzilla-type character – a giant, clown-like and slightly grotesque girl who plays with and destroys a city, ultimately bouncing up and down the Eiffel Tower in intercourse. Mattuschka, present for a Q&A was delightful and so insightful, sharing her experience of her practice as an artist/filmmaker/painter and the challenges to her craft of both performing in and directing this film.
I'm not too sure this book as a whole, which interweaves thematically related fragments—themes such as travel, nomadic living, flights (both in the sense of air travel and running away), bodies, dissection, anatomy—that transcend time/place/history/country is really coming together for me and I've had to put it down and pick it up, reading other books in between. Yet I have persisted as some passages are so astute and resonant, not to mention beautifully written. I like the book's corporeality and grotesqueness (I enjoy the visceral, eerie, female writing of Mariana Enríquez and Ottessa Moshfegh, whose characters also refuse to obey societal norms, who opt out or who subvert the social and expectations through obscene bodily expression) and Tokarczuk's musings on bodies and limbs whether dead, preserved or living.
The following passage comprises the translation of incoherent and unintelligible mutterings of an old, homeless woman living outside society, who wears layers of clothes and spends her time cursing passengers and passersby at an underground station in Moscow.
A young mother with a chronically ill child and distant husband has relief from her household duties once a week when her mother-in-law visits and does crucial housekeeping and caring for the young boy. On one of these days off, the mother finds herself emotionally blocked up and unwilling to go home. Her attention is captured by the old woman (perhaps she sees something of herself in her) and the mother proceeds to spend her subsequent days riding the underground and finding somewhere warm to sleep like a boiler room, and unable to remember her family urgently enough to return to them.
I remember first learning about Opie's work at McGill and have always loved her exploration of queer identify, love, family - her portraits exude beauty and dignity and force her viewer to consider a more compassionate, caring and accepting world.
I can't seem to find more information on Alexandra Sasha Beverly Pabst other than on the Musée Carnavalet website, which says she was born in 1930 in Milwaukee and that these photographs, which struck me, were taken in Paris in 1983.
I adored this book, which was, in some ways, despite different lived experiences, very familiar to me. With such precision and shown through behaviour rather than description, Huisman narrates the relationship dynamics between family members and how we act according to what we need from our loved ones, including the need to confirm the narratives that keep us well and alive, whether un/reasonable, sane, destructive, passionate, excessive, violent, adoring.
She captures the impossible task of a daughter to imagine the unknowns and unknowables of her mother's intimate thoughts, rationales and history, chronicling an imagined interiority governed by the earliest and most sticky of traumas that lead to obsessions around abandon, worthiness of love, health, wellness and pain, freedom and what we deserve or are owed to be free. Huisman's story interrogates the inheritance of our traumas by looking back across multiple generations: within her examination is the consistent tension between saving our forbears, idolising and worshipping them, holding them as ultimate judge of our goodness and accomplishments, with the need to separate from them, hate them, mould ourselves in contrast to or competition with them, needing them to die while also live indefinitely in order for us to persevere with recognisable definition and continuity.
