La Danse Française
There are spirits and they can be photographed. In an uncanny, almost magical act of conjuring up the eye with the semblance of shadows, the “photographic momentum” has attested to this novel envisioning of the body enduring time. Old forgotten lives and presences have eloquently been fossilized in emulsion. The dialectics of reason have been reconciled with the metaphysics of religion, and the tangible with the intangible. To the eyes of people from all walks of life, photographs arise as the ubiquitous remains of what is deemed to evaporate and ultimately vanish with the flow of time. Be they real spirits or apparitions observed or preserved photographically, photographs are anchored between the realms of the visible and the invisible. They become, in Roland Barthes’ words, “the lexicon of each person’s idiolect”, and as such abolish any distinction between the luminous translucent flesh and the immaterial essence underlying it.
And yet, there are photographers such as Theresia Viska, who choose to cut themselves loose from this melancholy-drained envisioning of the photographic subject as an objet perdu. Viska’s overall engagement with photography shifts from representation to a performative enactment of the very “absence” the photographic speech is supposedly about. By exploiting the structural and materialist properties of the camera apparatus to their fullest, Viska’s practice proposes performing the “ghostliness” sustained by the discarnate part each one of us carries within. It is precisely this daring experiencing of the ethereal interlace between the past and the present, family genealogies and personal visions that unburdens and at the same time relieves the gaze from the “culture of trauma” photography carries on its shoulders.
Long exposures, flash, and blurriness in suspended motion… Just with a shutter release, the “here-and-now” of the photographic act becomes everything. As a living presence, it punctuates solemnity at the moment of creation. As a quintessential ingredient of perception, it bridges temporal and spatial dichotomies while conferring continuity to life. Photography ultimately becomes the container of an expanding self-openness and a medium of personal healing. The words of Theresia Viska below will attest how the miracle is produced during the photographic momentum, how the omnipresent identity beneath the skin flourishes as the image surfaces on paper…
Back in 2006, Theresia Viska debuted in these very same pages with “Stable Girls”, a series of black and white photographs in which abstract conceptualism is linked with intuitive images of infantile femininity at the crossroads of representation. Now it is not young riders but “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska’s most recent project, where this very feel of a rhythmical drifting in dreamful suspension bursts out in the form of dancing figures that dissolve into space and time. It could be real people dancing on a backdrop of a military academy at a castle in Stockholm. It could be Viska’s ancestors –knights and warriors, fathers and mothers. It could be here and now, there and then. What counts, after all, is the mood and the liberation of senses photography proposes.
The words to follow will be about the past and the present, about an ever-expanding self alimented by photography, a book, and an exhibition of ghosts, and once more about photography encompassing time, film, ceramics. At the outset of her new project, “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska is sharing her reflections with Eyemazing.
Natasha Christia: To begin with, could you describe to us how “La Danse Française” was born?
Theresia Viska: After the release of my first book “Stable Girls” in 2006, I had high expectations of what could happen, but they all sort of failed. At that time I was not aware that it takes much more than a couple of exhibitions to establish oneself. I got depressed and had no clue how to proceed with my photography. I began taking random, subject-unspecific pictures. After a couple of months, I went through the first rolls and realized that it was really something about my family and self. Then an opportunity came up out of the blue. While I was shooting a freelance assignment at the Military Academy of Stockholm, it occurred to me that I could try making photography within this context. My family has been in the army for over three hundred years. So, I solicited for permission to go back and take pictures of a personal character this time. The Academy responded affirmatively and suggested I attended their annual winter ball where the young cadets dance La Dance Française. This was an interesting idea. Both my parents and grandparents have been attending these balls. Yes that was it: I was going to take pictures of my father, mother and of all my old ancestors!
NC: When you embarked on this project were you aware that the final result would turn out to be this peculiar ghost story?
TV: I did know that some “wrong” images would come out. At the time I was shooting my random pictures, everything around me was melting —shapes and colours. All of my photographs were beautifully staged and yet, there was always something wrong about them. On the other hand, I was conscious that producing sharp images of the beautiful guests would be really dull. It would be too perfect, too neatly done. So, when I began, I would have the camera in long-shot shuttle and small flash just to obtain rather blurry images. Another factor of paramount importance was that for the “Stable Girls” book project I had spent one whole year wandering in the stables. Now, for “La Danse Française”, I just had at my disposal two or four opportunities in a year, and in each occasion, just a couple of hours. Therefore, before the ball I needed to be very clear on how to obtain images that would work and during the event be overly concentrated. Despite this, various complications arose on my way. Two of my cameras broke down and I ended up using my pocket camera. But, in the end, it all went pretty well!
NC: The way you have chosen to represent your ancestors is quite spooky. To the eyes of many people, it could even be regarded unflattering and most certainly ambivalent and grotesque. Does the project express an underlying demythologizing attitude towards the past and the notion of tradition?
TV: No, not at all. “La Danse Française” does not constitute any critical statement. It is about ghosts basically. The whole series is impregnated by the mood resembling the atmosphere of “Twin Peaks” or that movie sequence from “The Shining”, when Jack Nicholson wakes up in the middle of the night and all of a sudden there is a big party. I wanted my pictures to feel similar. I wanted the viewers to “enter” a house where they hear sounds without actually seeing something. I wanted them to feel watched by ghosts –creatures that are not necessarily mean but not normal either. Ghosts have been undoubtedly dead for a long time or since last year, which makes it normal for them to look sometimes beautiful and sometimes a little scary!
NC: I am curious to know what kind of reactions to this ghost and monster photo-tale you got from the military academy. Did they approve of your peculiar style?
TV: They were aware of my style since the beginning. I had explained my intentions clearly: I was not going to take pictures of the guests, but would work in artistic terms. When they saw the work, they thought it was fantastic. I asked them if they would like to be mentioned in the book to be released —it would be totally understandable if they did not wish to be represented like this. But they did! They are proud to be within the project! Judging from their profile—the Stockholm military academy is based at the Castle of Karlberg, a 16th century castle full of mural paintings—you would expect them to be strict and old-fashioned but this is not their case at all. They embrace contemporary culture.
NC: In comparison to your first artistic project, “Stable Girls”, which negotiates female representation in alternative spaces, “La Danse Française” is more intuitive and imagination-driven, as if the very illusory metaphysics of representation were at stake here. Form and content is diluted in movement…
TV: That was also my purpose in “Stable Girls”: Formulating a proposition in memory with less-specific images instead of a fact-based documentary practice. But here it got more intense. I let loose, wore a really nice dress, went to the ball and had a great time with my camera, this is what happened in “La Danse Française”. I may work as a press photographer on a daily basis, but no one can take my ghost images away from me!
Now, as far as blurriness is concerned, already in “Stable Girls” I was expressing my frustration with the “pure image”. My stance towards this clean aesthetic, which is so popular today in the inception of photography as an intellectual exercise, is the following: If the image is too close to your reality, with perfect colours and thorough veracity at the time of representation, photography is unnecessary. You should better exhibit the object instead. Half of the job is to make the image, and the other half “to paint” on it. You have to put your signature on the photograph when you work on it!
NC: Does this last commentary stand for as an explanation for the presence of so many autobiographical elements in your work? It is as if you regarded necessary for photography to establish a link with your life in order to obtain a sense...
TV: According to my point of view, if you make a photo-story about something you do not relate to, it can be up to 99% perfect. Still, if you have an emotion about it, there is a little more percentage added to this, and this little bit makes the difference. It costs so much money, effort and time to bring a project ahead, so a strong inner motivation is essential in order to keep going!
NC: And photography? What input has photography had in your life?
TV: I was always having a really hard time at school. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was trying out different kind of jobs —working at a restaurant, taking care of the elderly—or was just traveling around. When I met my husband about eight years ago, we decided, why not take a photography course, travel around taking pictures and selling them? So, in 2001, I enrolled to a one-year photography course. For the first assignment, whose theme was “contact”, I went back to my old stable and took pictures of the girls. When I came out of the darkroom and showed the images to my teacher, he was impressed. That was it. Magic! It had always been so difficult to express myself with words and finally somebody had understood me thanks to photography. The camera helped me canalise my high energy and express myself, and this was such a relief. At last, I could concentrate. Nothing was actually wrong with me! Paradoxically I don’t travel that much anymore. When I make photography, it is more like travelling to my own world. I stay more at home now; I feel more at home now!
C: So, do you feel even closer to yourself after completing this series?
TV: I feel relieved. I reached my comfort zone and hopefully it will be different afterwards. I like the grotesque. I like to surprise people, to make the beautiful vulgar. Hopefully I will continue though I have no idea about the future!
NC: But you must have some plans for “La Danse Française”!
TV: Yes, definitively! In November, when it gets darker, a ghost exhibition opens at the KG52 gallery in Stockholm. I am currently working with an art director in an artist’s book similar to “Stable Girls” to accompany the exhibit. I have also asked a history teacher to have a look through the diary my grandfather wrote when he was soldier in the Finish winter war in the 1940s. He will contribute additional text inspired from this source…
NC: This is an interesting element. It provides another dimension to the non-site specific, timeless images of the series.
TV: The series becomes more reality-based, I guess. There will be real whispers from ghosts in my images, although my grandfather managed to survive this war!
NC: What about the movement and blurriness present in your pictures? Are they suggestive of an interest in shifting to film in the near future?
TV: Actually, yes! I will accompany “La Danse Française” series with a video that consists of a close-up portrait of a small girl, my 11 year-old niece, sleeping on water. The video will be projected at the narrow gallery corridor and will be the first thing the visitor will see when entering from the street. The main show will be featured at the gallery’s main space, which is hosted at the cellar below.
NC: This all sounds like a dream-state regression to your childhood…
TV: Well, the film is not a direct hint to my early years. It rather alludes to the fever dreams of ice and water I used to have as a child, while expressing the feeling I have chosen for the whole series to breathe—a watery and greyish feeling similar to the aspect of my ghost images. But, besides film, I am also experimenting with other type of media as well, which will attribute multiple modes of experiencing to the whole series. There will be, for example, a wall with different ceramic masks of faces forced onto the ghosts. These masks allude to the face we assume when partying around with people, when, for instance, we are laughing at something when it is not funny.
NC: As I can understand then, you do not draw inspiration solely from photography…
TV: Very little, to be honest. I am rather inspired from excellently written books, the movies or the theatre. I love culture! I try to see as much as non photography-related art as possible. Today there are so many people taking pictures with a camera, and that is good, but unfortunately, there is too so much bad photography as well.
NC: What is bad photography for you?
TV: When you are not using the camera 100% but just 50%. Everyone can take a picture but, you know, this is simply just not enough…
NC: As if there were too much concept, at the expense of photography?
TV: Exactly. As if the concept was good but the rest needless. This is why I find it more challenging to get a grip on other genres of art. I think nowadays we, photographers, do not take on challenges with our proper apparatus. A photograph can be so extremely good but overly boring as well. My only wish is to see more experiment with the camera and the photograph!
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
Published in Eyemazing 03/2009
There are spirits and they can be photographed. In an uncanny, almost magical act of conjuring up the eye with the semblance of shadows, the “photographic momentum” has attested to this novel envisioning of the body enduring time. Old forgotten lives and presences have eloquently been fossilized in emulsion. The dialectics of reason have been reconciled with the metaphysics of religion, and the tangible with the intangible. To the eyes of people from all walks of life, photographs arise as the ubiquitous remains of what is deemed to evaporate and ultimately vanish with the flow of time. Be they real spirits or apparitions observed or preserved photographically, photographs are anchored between the realms of the visible and the invisible. They become, in Roland Barthes’ words, “the lexicon of each person’s idiolect”, and as such abolish any distinction between the luminous translucent flesh and the immaterial essence underlying it.
And yet, there are photographers such as Theresia Viska, who choose to cut themselves loose from this melancholy-drained envisioning of the photographic subject as an objet perdu. Viska’s overall engagement with photography shifts from representation to a performative enactment of the very “absence” the photographic speech is supposedly about. By exploiting the structural and materialist properties of the camera apparatus to their fullest, Viska’s practice proposes performing the “ghostliness” sustained by the discarnate part each one of us carries within. It is precisely this daring experiencing of the ethereal interlace between the past and the present, family genealogies and personal visions that unburdens and at the same time relieves the gaze from the “culture of trauma” photography carries on its shoulders.
Long exposures, flash, and blurriness in suspended motion… Just with a shutter release, the “here-and-now” of the photographic act becomes everything. As a living presence, it punctuates solemnity at the moment of creation. As a quintessential ingredient of perception, it bridges temporal and spatial dichotomies while conferring continuity to life. Photography ultimately becomes the container of an expanding self-openness and a medium of personal healing. The words of Theresia Viska below will attest how the miracle is produced during the photographic momentum, how the omnipresent identity beneath the skin flourishes as the image surfaces on paper…
Back in 2006, Theresia Viska debuted in these very same pages with “Stable Girls”, a series of black and white photographs in which abstract conceptualism is linked with intuitive images of infantile femininity at the crossroads of representation. Now it is not young riders but “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska’s most recent project, where this very feel of a rhythmical drifting in dreamful suspension bursts out in the form of dancing figures that dissolve into space and time. It could be real people dancing on a backdrop of a military academy at a castle in Stockholm. It could be Viska’s ancestors –knights and warriors, fathers and mothers. It could be here and now, there and then. What counts, after all, is the mood and the liberation of senses photography proposes.
The words to follow will be about the past and the present, about an ever-expanding self alimented by photography, a book, and an exhibition of ghosts, and once more about photography encompassing time, film, ceramics. At the outset of her new project, “La Danse Française”, Theresia Viska is sharing her reflections with Eyemazing.
Natasha Christia: To begin with, could you describe to us how “La Danse Française” was born?
Theresia Viska: After the release of my first book “Stable Girls” in 2006, I had high expectations of what could happen, but they all sort of failed. At that time I was not aware that it takes much more than a couple of exhibitions to establish oneself. I got depressed and had no clue how to proceed with my photography. I began taking random, subject-unspecific pictures. After a couple of months, I went through the first rolls and realized that it was really something about my family and self. Then an opportunity came up out of the blue. While I was shooting a freelance assignment at the Military Academy of Stockholm, it occurred to me that I could try making photography within this context. My family has been in the army for over three hundred years. So, I solicited for permission to go back and take pictures of a personal character this time. The Academy responded affirmatively and suggested I attended their annual winter ball where the young cadets dance La Dance Française. This was an interesting idea. Both my parents and grandparents have been attending these balls. Yes that was it: I was going to take pictures of my father, mother and of all my old ancestors!
NC: When you embarked on this project were you aware that the final result would turn out to be this peculiar ghost story?
TV: I did know that some “wrong” images would come out. At the time I was shooting my random pictures, everything around me was melting —shapes and colours. All of my photographs were beautifully staged and yet, there was always something wrong about them. On the other hand, I was conscious that producing sharp images of the beautiful guests would be really dull. It would be too perfect, too neatly done. So, when I began, I would have the camera in long-shot shuttle and small flash just to obtain rather blurry images. Another factor of paramount importance was that for the “Stable Girls” book project I had spent one whole year wandering in the stables. Now, for “La Danse Française”, I just had at my disposal two or four opportunities in a year, and in each occasion, just a couple of hours. Therefore, before the ball I needed to be very clear on how to obtain images that would work and during the event be overly concentrated. Despite this, various complications arose on my way. Two of my cameras broke down and I ended up using my pocket camera. But, in the end, it all went pretty well!
NC: The way you have chosen to represent your ancestors is quite spooky. To the eyes of many people, it could even be regarded unflattering and most certainly ambivalent and grotesque. Does the project express an underlying demythologizing attitude towards the past and the notion of tradition?
TV: No, not at all. “La Danse Française” does not constitute any critical statement. It is about ghosts basically. The whole series is impregnated by the mood resembling the atmosphere of “Twin Peaks” or that movie sequence from “The Shining”, when Jack Nicholson wakes up in the middle of the night and all of a sudden there is a big party. I wanted my pictures to feel similar. I wanted the viewers to “enter” a house where they hear sounds without actually seeing something. I wanted them to feel watched by ghosts –creatures that are not necessarily mean but not normal either. Ghosts have been undoubtedly dead for a long time or since last year, which makes it normal for them to look sometimes beautiful and sometimes a little scary!
NC: I am curious to know what kind of reactions to this ghost and monster photo-tale you got from the military academy. Did they approve of your peculiar style?
TV: They were aware of my style since the beginning. I had explained my intentions clearly: I was not going to take pictures of the guests, but would work in artistic terms. When they saw the work, they thought it was fantastic. I asked them if they would like to be mentioned in the book to be released —it would be totally understandable if they did not wish to be represented like this. But they did! They are proud to be within the project! Judging from their profile—the Stockholm military academy is based at the Castle of Karlberg, a 16th century castle full of mural paintings—you would expect them to be strict and old-fashioned but this is not their case at all. They embrace contemporary culture.
NC: In comparison to your first artistic project, “Stable Girls”, which negotiates female representation in alternative spaces, “La Danse Française” is more intuitive and imagination-driven, as if the very illusory metaphysics of representation were at stake here. Form and content is diluted in movement…
TV: That was also my purpose in “Stable Girls”: Formulating a proposition in memory with less-specific images instead of a fact-based documentary practice. But here it got more intense. I let loose, wore a really nice dress, went to the ball and had a great time with my camera, this is what happened in “La Danse Française”. I may work as a press photographer on a daily basis, but no one can take my ghost images away from me!
Now, as far as blurriness is concerned, already in “Stable Girls” I was expressing my frustration with the “pure image”. My stance towards this clean aesthetic, which is so popular today in the inception of photography as an intellectual exercise, is the following: If the image is too close to your reality, with perfect colours and thorough veracity at the time of representation, photography is unnecessary. You should better exhibit the object instead. Half of the job is to make the image, and the other half “to paint” on it. You have to put your signature on the photograph when you work on it!
NC: Does this last commentary stand for as an explanation for the presence of so many autobiographical elements in your work? It is as if you regarded necessary for photography to establish a link with your life in order to obtain a sense...
TV: According to my point of view, if you make a photo-story about something you do not relate to, it can be up to 99% perfect. Still, if you have an emotion about it, there is a little more percentage added to this, and this little bit makes the difference. It costs so much money, effort and time to bring a project ahead, so a strong inner motivation is essential in order to keep going!
NC: And photography? What input has photography had in your life?
TV: I was always having a really hard time at school. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was trying out different kind of jobs —working at a restaurant, taking care of the elderly—or was just traveling around. When I met my husband about eight years ago, we decided, why not take a photography course, travel around taking pictures and selling them? So, in 2001, I enrolled to a one-year photography course. For the first assignment, whose theme was “contact”, I went back to my old stable and took pictures of the girls. When I came out of the darkroom and showed the images to my teacher, he was impressed. That was it. Magic! It had always been so difficult to express myself with words and finally somebody had understood me thanks to photography. The camera helped me canalise my high energy and express myself, and this was such a relief. At last, I could concentrate. Nothing was actually wrong with me! Paradoxically I don’t travel that much anymore. When I make photography, it is more like travelling to my own world. I stay more at home now; I feel more at home now!
C: So, do you feel even closer to yourself after completing this series?
TV: I feel relieved. I reached my comfort zone and hopefully it will be different afterwards. I like the grotesque. I like to surprise people, to make the beautiful vulgar. Hopefully I will continue though I have no idea about the future!
NC: But you must have some plans for “La Danse Française”!
TV: Yes, definitively! In November, when it gets darker, a ghost exhibition opens at the KG52 gallery in Stockholm. I am currently working with an art director in an artist’s book similar to “Stable Girls” to accompany the exhibit. I have also asked a history teacher to have a look through the diary my grandfather wrote when he was soldier in the Finish winter war in the 1940s. He will contribute additional text inspired from this source…
NC: This is an interesting element. It provides another dimension to the non-site specific, timeless images of the series.
TV: The series becomes more reality-based, I guess. There will be real whispers from ghosts in my images, although my grandfather managed to survive this war!
NC: What about the movement and blurriness present in your pictures? Are they suggestive of an interest in shifting to film in the near future?
TV: Actually, yes! I will accompany “La Danse Française” series with a video that consists of a close-up portrait of a small girl, my 11 year-old niece, sleeping on water. The video will be projected at the narrow gallery corridor and will be the first thing the visitor will see when entering from the street. The main show will be featured at the gallery’s main space, which is hosted at the cellar below.
NC: This all sounds like a dream-state regression to your childhood…
TV: Well, the film is not a direct hint to my early years. It rather alludes to the fever dreams of ice and water I used to have as a child, while expressing the feeling I have chosen for the whole series to breathe—a watery and greyish feeling similar to the aspect of my ghost images. But, besides film, I am also experimenting with other type of media as well, which will attribute multiple modes of experiencing to the whole series. There will be, for example, a wall with different ceramic masks of faces forced onto the ghosts. These masks allude to the face we assume when partying around with people, when, for instance, we are laughing at something when it is not funny.
NC: As I can understand then, you do not draw inspiration solely from photography…
TV: Very little, to be honest. I am rather inspired from excellently written books, the movies or the theatre. I love culture! I try to see as much as non photography-related art as possible. Today there are so many people taking pictures with a camera, and that is good, but unfortunately, there is too so much bad photography as well.
NC: What is bad photography for you?
TV: When you are not using the camera 100% but just 50%. Everyone can take a picture but, you know, this is simply just not enough…
NC: As if there were too much concept, at the expense of photography?
TV: Exactly. As if the concept was good but the rest needless. This is why I find it more challenging to get a grip on other genres of art. I think nowadays we, photographers, do not take on challenges with our proper apparatus. A photograph can be so extremely good but overly boring as well. My only wish is to see more experiment with the camera and the photograph!
Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved.
Published in Eyemazing 03/2009
