Gisèle Vienne is a French-Austrian artist, photographer, director and choreographer known for her stage and installation work that delves deep into the subconscious, investigating personal relationships, violence and trauma. Born in 1976 in Charleville-Mézières, France, Vienne studied philosophy before attending the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette (puppetry), where she developed her unique approach to performance.
Vienne’s work features a haunting blend of puppetry, life-sized mannequins and live performers, with notable productions including Jerk (2008) and Crowd (2017). She is considered one of the most unconventional directors and choreographers in Europe. For Berlin Art Week, she will be putting on a large-scale “play”, as Vienne calls it, at Haus am Waldsee, as well as new work at the Georg Kolbe Museum and a screened performance at Sophiensæle.
Starting during Berlin Art Week, you’re involved in an unprecedented number of exhibitions and performances across Berlin. You must have so much to do!
And there’s a book coming out, too, in collaboration with the great German publisher Spector Books on the 11th of September, which has turned into a really big chorographic art piece. I’m very excited about the curatorial project Anna Gritz, the director from Haus am Waldsee is putting together with the Kolbe Museum and Andrea Niederbuchner from Sophiensæle, because you cannot analyse my work from just the prism of contemporary art or from contemporary dance theatre. The work needs to be approached in its globality, from dance to installation, from sculpture to movie, but also from economy, philosophy and politics.
At any age, your body can be a battleground between normative political society and your own personal experience
This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play at Haus am Waldsee will be filled with mannequins that explore the dreams of adolescence and counterculture movements…
These life-sized teenage and pre-teen dolls are the main actors of the play and their anthropomorphic representations express a whole range of emotions. As a teenager, in fact at any age, your body can be a battleground between normative political society and your own personal experience. Your body becomes defined by systems of power, like gender, and this cultural violence is so often played down as being caused by raging hormones. The body is also a crucial site of resistance. As an adult, I still rage but I’ve come to understand my anger better.
You called the exhibition a play – why?
Because to call it a play is to invite different expectations in the viewer. If you go to the theatre, you expect movement and sound, but if it is just static, some people could say that nothing happens. And the question is: how do we open ourselves to new ways of thinking and looking? Altering expectations helps us to think differently.
Definitions are political and frame our way of perceiving, for example silence and immobility are defining various experiences that are never actually silent and immobile. Because silence doesn’t exist, just as immobility doesn’t exist. A dead body is never immobile, there is always movement. Not being able to listen to silence and immobility amputates our capacity of understanding. Hierarchies of perception define what can be heard and seen, and, consequently, these micro-behaviours continue to structure society.
Why are you so keen to unravel these perceptive frames?
Thinking about the structure of our societies stops me going crazy in this neoliberal authoritarian fascistic world. Understanding the antidemocratic characteristics of neoliberalism, that are so well explained in The Ungovernable Society: A Genealogy of Authoritarian Liberalism by Grégoire Chamayou, helps me to live. There is always a question about how you choose to act as a human.
And though it’s important to be an activist and to change the world, you must also work on changing the perceptive frame. That’s why I think it’s important to be very active in both art and philosophical work, as these working fields allow us to work structurally on our societies.
So activism is not enough and you need to look at institutionalised structures of perception?
I think they complement each other. But you will not erase racism if you don’t work on the perceptive structures rooted in our psychic systems. It’s the same with sexism and all types of inequality. The art world can play an immense role in altering our perceptive frame, but often it tends to reinforce pre-existing power structures, like, for example, neoliberalism.
The whole Hollywood industry is a powerful tool to ingrain political systems that I’m fighting against. I think this is where I’m most useful. It can be slow, but you can see that intersectional thinking is putting huge stress on the political ideologies of extreme right-wing leaders like Putin and Trump, affecting their structures of thinking and their constructions of society.
Your film Jerk will be played at Sophiensæle during Berlin Art Week, loosely based on the American serial killer, Candyman. What drew you to the subject?
I wanted to understand why humans can be violent towards other humans. Jerk deals with the mechanism of violence. The serial killer abuses two teenagers, so that they bring him other teenagers who he would then kill in the most horrible way. He begins by taking away their identity and their humanity. And this has also to do with perception – hyperviolence starts with the gaze. Genocide is made possible with the way humans perceive other humans: when other humans aren’t seen as human or fully human anymore, like for example when they can be qualified as animals – with all my respect for animals.
Is it a form of disassociation?
Recently, there was this horrible story about these two French rugby men raping and beating up a woman in Argentina. I guess they didn’t consider that woman as fully human. That mindset made it possible. The question of rape comes up often in Jerk, too. Rape has nothing to do with sexuality but with issues of power and domination.
Rape is a weapon, a way of torturing somebody, just like with a knife, a gun, a rope. The meaning of rape has also got to be considered – it’s also a language, a non-verbal language: to act is to speak in a non-verbal way. I highly recommend reading Rita Laura Segato’s brilliant essay ‘The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women in Ciudad Juárez’, in which she develops this idea and shows how rape, as a mandate of masculinity, serves a system like neoliberalism.
You tackle sexual abuse and its appalling legacy in the theatre piece, Extra Life, recently shown at Theatertreffen in May 2024…
The story is about the possible life and future of two young adults that were abused as children. The piece is set as they return from a party, after being with a community of people with whom they could talk about what they went through, dance and love. Their traumatic experience made them cut off their emotions to survive the violence they’d been through. That cutting off lasted for years until the moment where they can slowly open up their emotions again, grounding their sociability and thinking.
In November, you’ll be staging a live performance of Crowd at the Sophiensæle. It’s an exploration of 90s club culture that slowly reveals the ecstatic emotional states of a group of dancers…
Crowd creates a state of hypersensitivity and joy, based on movements with the fascias and states of deep consciousness. Spaces of counterculture, like clubs, can be amazing for thinking, being creative, being active and being spaces of resistance.
One of the aims of your work is to expand the sensitivity and empathy of the audience…
A shared emotional experience can be great for thinking. You perceive very differently according to your emotions or mindset and if you’re alone or in a shared space. So, if you’re in love or angry or sad or super excited, you see and perceive things differently. I’m very interested in how our perception gets altered through emotions.
Can you give an example of when this happened to you?
When I was working on Crowd, I experienced an immense love story with a woman in Berlin. The city and the early 90s techno scene became entwined with that love story. Of course, there is a person I love who is triggering emotions in me and making everything different! So, I’m watching the light, I’m listening to music. I’m watching the trees, every day I’m tasting the food, everything is intensified and different. And this state makes you question everything, even in a philosophical and political way, like the idea of heterosexuality as both a sexual practice and a political system.
In neoliberal spaces, artistic and critical artistic experience can get swallowed and destroyed by the goal of capitalising on it
There should be two words for heterosexuality. Monique Wittig, one of my favourite writers and theorists, writes about it in The Straight Mind. Because having sexual intercourse with a different gender is one thing. The heterosexual system as an economic or political system is another thing, and there should be separate words to underline the two very different ideas.
Heterosexuality as an economic, political system is the base for a patriarchal system that exploits females and serves a neoliberal capitalist system. The fact that the two ideas are blended in one notion makes the political economical system invisible through a so-called natural situation. And neoliberalism does not come from nature.
How do you square these beliefs with your involvement in the art world?
In neoliberal spaces, artistic and critical artistic experience can get swallowed and destroyed by the goal of capitalising on it. I try to provoke, hopefully, deep and meaningful experiences with my work, a place for metaphysical interior critical thinking. For me, working as an artist and experiencing other artworks and their pluralities of form and formal questioning can be great thinking methodologies.
You’re also showing a new film, Kerstin Kraus at Georg Kolbe Museum…
I’m really happy to be in this historic show with my work alongside artists like Hannah Höch, Claude Cahun and Estelle Hanania. I will be showing an installation and a short 10-minute movie I shot in 2019, featuring the exceptional actress Kerstin Daley-Baradel. She was a long-term and very close collaborator of mine, but she died in 2019 and I couldn’t work on it again until recently. But when I talked with Kolbe, I thought it was the right time. So, it’s an old new work and a tribute to her.
It’s also a work to do with dissociation, a portrait of a woman who is having metaphysical thoughts about being and death, speaking to herself through a ventriloquist’s dummy. She was the daughter of a famous ventriloquist who died many years ago, and she’s alone in the house with one of his dummies. It’s so beautiful that we can premiere it in Berlin with her children and her family there, too.
Having lived in Berlin in the 90s, how does it feel to be such a prominent part of Berlin Art Week?
It’s wonderful. Growing up in the suburbs of Grenoble, there was always this fantasy about Berlin from childhood on as a dreamland of punks, gays and lesbians and counterculture that I had the chance to discover in the early 90s when I finally got to live here. I’ve always had this immense love for Berlin.
- Haus am Waldsee, Argentinische Allee 30, Zehlendorf, ‘This Causes Consciousness to Fracture – A Puppet Play’, opens Sep 12, details.
- Georg Kolbe Museum, Sensburger Allee 25, Westend ‘I Know That I Can Double Myself. Gisèle Vienne and the Puppets and the Avantgarde’, opens Sep 13, details.
- Sophiensæle Sophienstr. 18, Mitte, Jerk, Sep 15, starts 14:00, details.
