Life is of a Presentness that Burns.
Christiana Perschon.
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Anne Faucheret
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An essay by Anne Faucheret accompanied by Clarice Lispector • Luce Irigaray • Margaret Olin • Kaja Silvermann • Barbara Kruger • Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari • Maria Ruido • Jacques Lacan • Rebecca Solnit among many. 

"Life is of a Presentness that burns. "

– Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., 1964 

Christiana Perschon’s films are portraits that do not pierce intimacies, tributes that do not sacralize, images that do not represent, frames that do not separate. Spending time means working, devoting oneself and caring. Holding space means embracing, occupying and maintaining. These actions characterize feminist artistic work as much as reproductive labor. Together, the four words that form the show’s title describe core methods of the artist’s practice, along with listening, noticing and being affected. In her works, she builds a framework for her protagonists to appear, interact and create moving images together with her camera – to which she confers its own agency. 

In dialogue with female artists from previous generations, Perschon has developed a specific method of portrayal, invoking and incorporating the artistic working process of the protagonist – or one aspect of it. Each filmic portrait has its own logic and aesthetic. This show features two new films from the series.

"Your silence exists as does my self-gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still ask ourselves how to speak to each other, without taking breath away from them."
– Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, 1997 

Stille verschieben is a video work with Inge Dick, standing out against a seemingly infinite twilight sky aboard an old Zille boat that causes the camera and the horizon to gently sway. Perschon spends time with Inge Dick, who has meticulously investigated the passage of time as it translates into shades of color and light, and invites the viewer to question regulated and normed temporalities. The three-channel set-up – each channel corresponding to one shot – multiplies the views on the lakeside, and crystallizes time. The water is out of sight. The mountains, the boat line and the protagonist, filmed against the (sky)light, are rather hinted at than seen. The very slow transition from evening light to darkness, into which Inge Dick’s body finally blends, prevents the eyes from really seeing what is happening: too slow to be seen, the motions and color shifts are rather sensed. In the film, sight cannot survey space. Instead, it touches upon metaphysical and planetary time. Stille verschieben is filled with quietness and stillness. No event, no resolution, nothing happens, or very little. As a juxtaposition of three long shots, the film refuses to indulge in classic narration and its tricks – like time manipulation with cuts and ellipses. It also refuses to indulge in symbolism and romanticism, as the setting – a woman on a boat in a rocky landscape – could suggest. When Inge Dick, in the middle of the third shot, picks up the paddle to bring the boat back, her body has already become a silhouette. She gently moves as if she were sailing forever until the darkness ultimately swallows her silhouette completely, while the water lapping against the boat’s hull remains.

"If you can look back, you cannot be possessed by the gaze of the other. What is proposed is not a stare-down. It is a shared gaze. Rather than emphasizing the power of the gazing one to make the one gazed at into an object, this idea suggests responsibility toward the person looking back at one."

– Margaret Olin, Gaze in Critical Terms for Art and History, 1996 

Perschon's gaze does not dominate or assess things. It does not break through or organize the horizon. The question of the (cultural) gaze and of regimes of looking – which are not only about vision – is crucial and diffracted everywhere in the filmmaker’s practice: her own gaze as an artist and as a filmmaker is entangled with her gaze as a woman, as a feminist, as a mother, as a friend. Her gaze is situated and embodied – she appears either visually or through her voice – and is co-constituted with her camera, which is not an extension of her eyes or body alone, but an apparatus, a collusion between technical specificities, socio-cultural representations, political projections, and at the same time the receiver of the protagonists’ counter-gaze. This multilayered gaze determines the spectator’s gaze. In order not to be tempted to hold the protagonists in her own gaze, to hold them “captive” as Chantal Akerman would say, the artist creates the framing and storytelling conditions for them to act as performers, not to be objects of scrutiny. They aren’t simply looked at. They look back and act. The artist creates dialogical constellations of gazes. 

"If our gaze meets with a sufficient number of other gazes, it is able to reconfigure the screen, bringing previously unlit parts into the foreground and darkening those that today emerge as normative representations."

– Kaja Silvermann, The Threshold of our Visible World, 1996 

In the three-minute, black-and-white 16mm film Friedl, time and space, body and gaze, words and silence collide. Resonating with Friedl vom Gröller Kubelka’s own practice – most of her films are silent, shot on a single roll of black-and-white 16mm stock and last three minutes – Friedl is an intimate encounter, a moment that could be never-ending, and an affective, conceptual and playful exchange between both artists on Friedl’s terrain. Friedl subtly but firmly determines her own image: her performative tricks, her cigarette, her hand, her smile and her words create smoky screens and haptic images, which give rise to a singular insight: only a trustful reciprocity and a – slightly uncanny – intimacy can create such a film. The film entangles transparency and opacity, presence and absence, background and motif, the visible and the invisible, through a precise arrangement of what is in the frame and what is off-screen or out of range, what is withheld and what is exposed, what is synchronized or offset, and what is overlapping or consecutive. On white sheets of paper held in front of the screen in the style of opening credits, “ICH WILL / NICHT / GEFILMT WERDEN / UND KEIN INTERVIEW / GEBEN” (I do not want to be filmed or give an interview) can be read while the sound of a pen becomes perceptible – within a short time lapse. The central scene consists of one shot of Friedl’s smoking and smiling, partly accompanied by her words, partly silent. The two spoken sequences, like brackets before and after the silent smoking scene – stand out against a screen, black or white, with English subtitles. These spoken sequences are actually two odes to silence. Nearby the projection in the gallery, a looped filmstrip hangs from the ceiling alongside a light box. Offering another experience of film, privileging touch and closeness over vision and distance, it unveils shots of Perschon, taken by vom Gröller herself, as a counterpart of Friedl, with the title I don’t want to be filmed but rather shoot myself. Again, the reciprocity, the intimacy, and the admiration between the two artists is tangible and palpable. 

Your gaze hits the side of my face. 

– Barbara Kruger, 1981 3 

Perschon’s portraits are tributes to particular women artists who have inspired her – and this is even clearer as she adopts one or another working method of the artist she portrays in each film. They are also a celebration of the feminist and transgenerational homage per se – that is, a form of writing life, memory, history that is cooptative and collective, a corrective of the classic legitimation system and able to remedy the biases of the “great” art (his)story writing. Paying homage is also a way to place herself in a genealogy of feminist practices, which have tackled the colonization of women’s bodies, their reduction to reproductive tools, their assignation to reproductive activities, and their related representation as gendered bodies, in order to outplay patriarchal subjugation and their multiple aesthetic and political translations. In doing so, Perschon doesn’t sacralize a few heroines with specific assets. Instead, she acknowledges the shared space, the milieu – in the Deleuzian sense of environment, but also of middle – in which artistic production and culture take place. The milieu is not only the world of inspirations and professional connections, but also the social sphere where shared ordinary life experiences take place, like parenting and care, especially in the context of capitalist discriminations – and out of which collective struggles can be forged.

"The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle."
– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980 

In Nursing an idea and a baby are the same not two different acts on simultaneously the same body, fellow mother artists come on stage with their babies to change diapers. The film begins with a reverse shot. From the stage, the camera offers a view of an empty auditorium. Initially dazzled by a strong spotlight, the viewers discover lit stair edges and seat numbers, first in silence, then accompanied by a rattle, soon followed by chirps, sighs, baby cries and female voices, which finally merge into a joyful cacophony. The spatial setting is clear: the film is shot in a cinema – a space dedicated to spectacle, performance, representation and display, structured around regimes of looking. Actually, the film takes place in the Invisible Cinema at the Austrian Film Museum, a black box setting imagined in the 1950s by Peter Kubelka and others to obtain the most focused filmgoing experience – removing any architectural disturbances, abstracting the space and hence separating it from the outside world. Cinema is a space where reproductive and maintenance activities are commonly misrepresented – if represented at all. Here, the common direction of the gaze is inverted as the first shot is directed from the stage at the – still empty – auditorium. The viewer is gradually incorporated into the film, first through sound, then through the shadows of two protagonists onstage, then through the materialization of bodies as the camera in the front takes the lead while another mother/child couple interacts onstage. The script is simple. A mother comes onstage with her child and her diaper changing kit. She changes diapers, tidies up and leaves the stage. Four couples follow one another. A kind of thickness arises as differences occur in the repetitions. Along with this, there is a strange feeling of unease toward the overexposure of gestures which usually belong to the intimate and domestic realm and toward the overperformance of these gestures, precisely because they happen onstage and, moreover, because they are followed by a burst of applause. The peer – and slightly fake – recognition onstage of labor that is commonly deprived of any value raises the question of mothering as performance, of parenting as a creative gesture, and of caring as the core of any artistic practice. It also asks the question of regimes of visibility and invisibility in general, in regards to gender and class. The complicity of viewers in these processes are obvious. Nursing in front of a gigantic movie screen, center stage, their gestures act as resistance, holding space in a dispositif that usually makes the conditions of production (and re-production) disappear and that consolidates normed regimes of looking.
"This socio-sexual division that devalued and condemned to invisibility, gratuity and non-work category a range of activities usually performed by women was and still is, not only false (women have worked and work in the domestic space providing items or services intended for the external consumption, thereby breaking the public versus private dichotomy), but it has also placed in the center of the economic question the logic of accumulation instead of the logic of sustainability, the production of commodities instead of the care for human life, and without whose energy, power and consumption, any other activity would be useless and impossible."
– Maria Ruido, Just Do It! Bodies and Images of Women in the New Division of Labor, 2011 

In opposition to a linear story with invisible editing that would lead to the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, adopting a variety of narrative methods, developing experimental tactics in production (soft focus, close-ups, angles, distances) and post-production (hard cuts, de-synchronization, alteration) and never concealing her presence and position – recalling that the gaze is always embodied, situated and constructed – Perschon's films reveal their own constructedness. The artist intervenes in the relationships between the filmmaker, the camera and the protagonist(s), as much as between the viewer and the film itself, recalibrating these around awareness, relationality and interdependence. This process of collective creation operates outside dominant (patriarchal) norms of representation and regimes of the gaze – commonly based on a one-sided relation between who films and “what” is filmed, who looks and “what” is looked at, determined by objectification and fetishization. In her films, subjects and objects co-constitute themselves. Or: the classic Cartesian distinction between subject and object no longer applies. Instead of being moving images which convey a story that is later interpreted, Perschon’s films bear the traces of caring encounters, they are the (unfinished) outcome of complex assemblages, where technical devices, filmic techniques and concrete matter exert their agencies as much as the humans involved – in a feminist materialist tradition. Thematically, technically and aesthetically, her materialist approach combines a queer feminist positioning – in the sense of Barbara Hammer’s technical syntax conveying desire and intimacy and refusing bodily-related taboos – with inspiration from feminine writing – in the political sense of Hélène Cixous, a kind of writing that is outside the masculine economy of patriarchal discourse and that takes place in the realm of the real, rather than the symbolic – and from Agnes Varda’s ciné-writing – which describes filmmaking as a careful craft where the overall rhythm of the film is defined by its editing structure and the juxtaposition of image and sound. 

"An image always blocks the truth.."
– Jacques Lacan, Yale University: Kanzer Seminar, 1974 

Understanding film as the materialization of encounters, relations, affects and effects, liberating film from any dramaturgical resolution and from any hermeneutic injunction, refusing to symbolize and to transfigure, Christiana Perschon’s films remain opaque, mysterious, sensible and sensuous. They joyfully stay with the trouble. 

"…to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery…"
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2006 

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Spending Time, Holding Space is the first solo show of artist and filmmaker Christiana Perschon in Vienna, taking place from 11 September until 19 October 2024 at DAS WEISSE HAUS. 

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Link to the artist's website
https://wtkb.org/about-new/https://christiana.perschon.at/
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Link to the exhibition's webiste
https://dasweissehaus.at/en/exhibition/einzelausstellung-spending-time-holding-space/