Daniela Müller
Whose work are you loving these days?
At the Venice Biennale Otobong Nkanga left a lasting impression on me. I especially loved her very graphical paintings where she combines body parts with machine and plant parts. They are not only very appealing to look at but more importantly they do work like a mind map. Each painting is a connected fragment of a visualised thinking process about social constructs, colonialism and the impact of men regarding nature and how everything is connected. I think they reflect very well the fact of imbalance that if one part of the world is winning it is often related to the losses in other parts. Also, I do follow the work of Camille Henrot. I am impressed by her ability to generate a multi-layered poetic universe in which she counterpoints chaos and order.
What book is on your nightstand?
I just got René Pollesch’s Kill your Darlings, a compilation of his theatre pieces from 2008 until 2012. What I like about his scripts is their expressive language, humour and the way they work with references. Important for me is as well how he develops the texts together with his actors. I have seen some of the plays on stage and I am excited to have the opportunity to spend more time with the texts and to experience them in a different way.
Your practice in 5 #
#nohashtags
What’s on your mind?
I spend a lot of time reading online discussion boards and niche scenes as I am interested in forms of collective writing. At the same time it is worrying for me how people socially construct their own truth, lacking the ability to check sources and how they develop their identity based on these online groups. I am especially concerned about the rising influence of the alt-right.
How does the body - yours and others' - influence your work?
In our collaborative group Opasne Krivine with Maria Belić and Per Westerlund we bring our bodies through several hours of material art performances in a state of physical and mental exhaustion to get in a mode of automatic writing. Even though language is a big part of my work, I normally use and rearrange texts – I don’t write and struggle to do so. The physical performance is a way to tricking our bodies to get collectively into a mode of bodily estranged writing. In my work Jennifer, the starting point of writing are the leaked pictures of a female actor. I sent them to other women and let them write about them whatever they want. Important for me was the non-sexualised gaze and how their own body and experiences with selfies influenced those texts. I wanted a linguistic female appropriation of these images, while they were circulating on porn sites. I published these texts as a book and performed them in a group of women. We were reading paragraphs while moving in between spectators.
In my recent video Concerning Cats, I am working with cat shows and the way cat judges, touch, measure and categorise the cats body. I appropriate texts from the artist and inventor of the cat show Harrison Weir, especially his encyclopaedic chapter listing terms starting with ‘cat’. I am intrigued by the linguistic examination of the cat in contrast to the physical. Where is the visual trace of the cat in the caterpillar or the catapult?
Daniela lives and works in Zurich.
October 2019
