KATHARINA SYKORA

Writing Life

As a writer, Annie Ernaux, who was born in the French countryside in 1940, has frequently weighed in on public debates about political participation. Having come from an environment of workers and small businesses, Ernaux has made her origins and steps in adapting to bourgeois, intellectual surroundings the starting point for her writing. Beginning in the 1970s, she initially published novels whose characters in part have autobiographical traits. As of 1984, however, Ernaux exclusively turned away from this classic narrative form and has since then developed prose forms with which she examines the social conditions of her own life. Her maxim, “in my opinion, writing is a political act,”¹ thus addresses the connection between the personal and the collective.

Also in 1984, Annie Ernaux simultaneously began integrating photographic practices into her texts. She creates a sort of literary snapshot that sketches a person or situation in just a few words, as if captured for a brief moment in a photo. Descriptions of photos that are not shown, but mark a crucial point in the narrative also play an important role. In addition, she develops photo-texts in which photographs and written interpretations of them directly collide with one another. And, finally, she works in the forms of the collage and the palimpsest, with complex interleavings of photography and text. With the help of such photo-literary approaches, Annie Ernaux attempts to create a notation of her life as seen through her sociologically schooled eye. Her writing thus forms a photo-sociobiography of herself and of people who play and have played a central role in her life.²

¹ Cited after Brigitte Aubonnet, “Entretien avec Annie Ernaux,” in Encres vagabondes, 1 (1994), pp. 40–42, esp. p. 42.
² See Fabien Aribert-Narce, “Annie Ernaux et la photo-socio-biographie. Vers une écriture de dehors,” in idem., Photobiographies pour une écriture de notation de la vie (Roland Barthes, Denis Roche, Annie Ernaux) (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2014), pp. 235–321.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 146/2019, pp. 9–20.

CHRISTIN MÜLLER

When Historical and Contemporary Views Meet

Individual balloons have missed their destination. They were caught on tree branches, guard rails, or power poles, or they sank to the ground under their considerable load. Only still slightly inflated, they waft in silent beauty at their finding places. In reality, the balloons are oversized plastic bags, around four to five meters high, possessed of the sole function of secretly transporting political flyers, newspapers, and magazines across the former inner-German border by air.¹ After a small explosion, triggered by a timer, the transported material fell to the ground at its destination. If this endeavor had not sometimes failed, and if the artist Jens Klein of Leipzig had not
fished these photographs documenting such paths of distribution out of the archive of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (BStU-Archiv), then we likely would never have seen these balloons and wouldn’t be able to marvel at their manifestation.

Archives open up a view into the past. Yet this retrospective view is never clear-cut. Indwelling source material like that of photography in particular—as a medium that records time and space without its own codification—are representations of past conditions that lend themselves to different interpretations. In lack of contextualization, the balloons from Jens Klein’s eponymous series °“Ballons” (Balloons, 2013) could be many things: a child’s game, Land Art, a performative installation, a meteorological instrument of measure, or simply a means of spreading material related to political interests. Sebastian Hau even puzzles over the “shamanic essence that has been slowly escaping from the balloons in these photographs.”²

¹ Publications were printed with the sole purpose of distributing them in East Germany, such as the magazines Legal Handeln, Rote Fahne, and Volksarmee. Over 13,000 copies of the book Flucht über See (Flight Across the Sea) by Heinz Ockler were found between February and December 1968, and even 77,660 leaflets in the Schwerin region between February and December 1966 (see MfS HA XX/AKG no. 5611, Part 1 of 2, esp. pp. 18 and 34).

² Sebastian Hau, “Some Balloons by Jens Klein,” ELSE #7, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, 2014, pp. 56–61, esp. p. 60.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 146/2019, pp. 21–32.

ALEXANDER GARCÍA DÜTTMANN

In the Contemporary for the Contemporary

A possible answer to the question “What is contemporary art?” is given by Joanna Piotrowska in a series of photographs showing women and men, young and middle aged, in makeshift structures, in shelters, tents, or fabric igloos. Contemporary art is whatever creates its own residence—a dwelling that can only be temporary, a dwelling in the contemporary and a dwelling for the contemporary. Works of contemporary art, then, are no longer lasting works. Rather, contemporary art involves a retreat without a dwelling or an abode, a station along a path leading from the contemporary to the contemporary. A path leading from the contemporary to the contemporary is a path that has been leveled for the contemporary.

Yet this pause does not occur under the open sky, outside, as if one were an earthly pilgrim or a wayfarer, a drifter or a refugee. Instead, the structures in Piotrowska’s photographs are always erected in a makeshift way inside of rooms, as if one had sought a personal corner rather than a site. One finds a temporary accommodation before yet another corner offers a self-made hideout. At times the structures benefit from the composition of the rooms in which they are standing. Rita, for instance, incorporated into her structure the generous passageway between two rooms, while Elsa is shown camping in a hallway using the narrow channel between the opposite walls in creating a canopy.

Each shelter was assembled with things found nearby. Gonzalo used the long arm of a flexible floor lamp to build a roof over his head and to illuminate his place of asylum from above. He implemented couch pillows, chairs placed on a table, towels, blankets, and rugs. Resting on the floor is a mat on which the young man wearing knee-length pants and a white T-shirt is sitting, his legs stretched out in front next to a book that he had placed next to a potted plant. The soles of Gonzalo’s feet look a bit soiled, as if he had walked barefoot across a not entirely clean wood floor, but he doesn’t give the impression of being in need, despite his pensive look. This pensiveness has a dutiful and conventional slant to it. Gonzalo is a child of contemporary art. The provisional has a tidy and immaculate appearance.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 146/2019, pp. 45–56.