Artists in residence

INTERVIEW

What changes and developments are to be noted in your work thanks to the residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Montmartre?

I began to write (= to think) on windows… Instead of taking notes on paper, I used chalk markers to write directly on one of the 8 windows of my studio. The choice of the window as a medium as well as a means of expression and perception has expanded my practice in ways I’m still learning about.
A window allows the outside and inside to co-exist (co-habitation) and perhaps even to communicate.
A window is not a wall but it creates distance. It contains desire.
A window – just like a skin – captures the tension between the intimate, the social and the public.
Infinite gratitude to studio H19 and its 8 windows which allowed me to experience, live & inhabit language visually, spatially and over a period of time.
Writing is my way of inhabiting a place. Living in a place is a way of writing it.
It became clear to me that what I was also doing was this:
“I write drawings.”
My artistic practice is based on reciprocity, is a form of love: a falling in love and sometimes out of love with language, speaking, and the act of writing.
By the end of the residency I had fallen back in love with life and living the life of an artist poet, including the “invisible” part, the part of my own invisibility.
In the words of Louise Bourgeois: You have to accept the fact that others don’t see what you do. / Art is a guarantee for sanity.”

An anecdote about your residency at the Cité internationale des arts?

I had to change studios in the middle of the residency. I left Studio H19, with its 8 (!) windows and wooden floors for studio C02, which came with a somewhat bizarre smell and a floor I couldn’t stand. I liked the wooden staircase and having a mezzanine, but the floor tiles! I write all of my drawings on the floor – I hate tiled floors. I was also really struggling with things coming to an end. I don’t like endings. I was still grieving H19. My body still longed for H19. 

I spent weeks trying to understand what the C02 floor needed from me to love = write it. When I covered / protected the floor with a transparent plastic sheet things changed. The odor disappeared. I used the plastic sheet as a medium for writing, as a storage unit, and an exhibition space. Everyday, I would walk, sit and move on a skin (a membrane) of language, a skin that offered protection to the writings on the floor while exposing and exhibiting them at the same time. Barthes says that language is a skin, that this skin impacts the skin of the other. Language suffered (took?) my steps and my weight, as well as the weight and the movements of visitors.

The title of my residency ? I LOVE LANGUAGE.

One of its main points of investigation: How to make visible the wounds of language.

BIOGRAPHIE

Artist and poet Christine Herzer (France/Germany) makes work that offers the viewer a multitude of meanings, moods, and experiences with which to interact, draw nourishment, and form their own understanding.

Using gestures of ‘overwriting’, ‘covering up’, ‘erasing’ and accumulation, she explores questions of invisibility, alienation and agency. Her series, ‘The TODAY drawings’, for example, is composed of a single word, TODAY, which the artist repeats or feels over and over again, as if rehearsing an ongoing present. 

Christine Herzer’s current research project, entitled “I LOVE LANGUAGE. How to make visible the wounds of language?” recontextualizes her ongoing series of ‘‘Written Drawings’ as a living archive from which to direct her investigations: What is the role of repetition in the creative process? How to show caring/devotion for words, as well as their meanings (emotional centers) and [ab]uses?

Born in Germany, Christine Herzer has lived, worked, and studied in different cultures (India, USA, France, Germany) and contexts (spiritual, artistic, corporate, economic). ORANGE, her new chapbook of poems, will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, NY) this summer.