FEMALE GAZE ON SURREALISM AND SCHIZOPHRENIA
#TAKEHEART RESIDENCE
Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as part of NEUSTART KULTUR.
TAKEHEART Residences hosted by Tanzhaus NRW Düsseldorf.
Toyen "Sad Days" 1942
"For me, madness was like a territory - opposite to reality - where an implacable light reigned, which left no room for shadow and which blinded us. It was a boundless immensity, unlimited, flat - a mineral, lunar, cold country, like the steppes of the North Pole. In this expanse, everything is unchanging, immobile, crystallised. The objects seem to be models of scenery, placed here and there, like geometric cubes, which would have lost all meaning. The people evolve strangely. They make gestures, movements that have no meaning. They are like ghosts walking around in this infinite plain, overwhelmed by the merciless light of electricity. And I was lost in there, isolated, cold, naked under the light and without purpose."
M.A. Sechehaye "Diary of a Schizophrenic” 1950
"I was also hearing voices. Sometimes it was a sizzling or screaming mess in my head, like a walkman at full volume that I couldn't keep away, no matter what I did. Sometimes I would bang my head against the wall to get the thumping to subside a little of the chaos. It helped sometimes, but not always."
Arnhild Lauveng "Tomorrow I was crazy: a journey into schizophrenia" 2019
Léonor Fini "Le choix du silence" 1987
"She needs to ask for paper, drawing pens, Indian ink. And above all her electrophone because she urgently needs to hear loud music that acts as a narcotic. She is full of confidence, someone will come and bring her everything she needs. She gives up on leaving her cell. She wants to stay here until her last breath. She only has to look at the door to see them, to see them going towards each other, and another part of the door to see him walking slowly, one beside the other, in a field flooded with sunlight. She is quite saved and happy. She will try to draw, as well as she can, the images that have appeared to her on the walls and on the floor."
Unica Zürn "The Jasmine Man" 1970
Unica Zürn "Das Leben,
ein schlechter Traum" 1964
Leonora Carrington, 'Down Below,' 1941
" Fabiau lowers his head and then raises it again, plunging his eyes into mine. Lucy, who has joined us, crouches behind me, his head on my shoulder, wraps his arms around me and then covers us all with his huge wing. We can't see anything anymore, but we feel so good. I sit on Lucy's lap and stick to him. I feel Fabiau's mouth seeking mine in the darkness, his fingers tangled in my hair. (...)
Marion - and if... and if I didn't exist, would you be someone else's angels? and if there were crazier ones than me, wouldn't you be with her?
Fabiau - I don't know what exactly you want to heal from, but from us you will never heal.
Lucy - the ones who are crazier than you should be careful!
Fabieu - if you didn't exist... we would be your angels in non-existence.
Sigrid - But not us. If you didn't exist we wouldn't exist either. We are your inventions not your angels. "
Annick Putters & Marion Whyte "Madame, Lettres d'une schizophrène à sa psy" 2020
Jane Gaverole "Ovide" 1949
"The usual rules of perspective and proportion were slipping, and it was like being in a Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali painting - very trying, and disturbing. (...) I knew that sidewalks are fifteen or twenty centimetres high, not fifteen or twenty meters, and that you don't die when you walk down them; but that wasn't the perception I had, and even if one part of me saw one thing, another part saw a very different one, and it was constantly more complicated to understand and sort out."
Arnhild Lauveng "Tomorrow I was crazy: a journey into schizophrenia" 2019
"She draws the curtains of the window, lies down on the couch and, through the open door of the terrace, she looks at the clouds. Very quickly this spectacle fascinates her. It seems to her that for the first time in her life she is finally observing the clouds which, on this day, are of great beauty. She is taken of a delirium of interpretation at the same time as she has hallucinations. She begins to see very precise images in the clouds: the whole of humanity's past flashes before her eyes; all the peoples of the world who have lived for millennia appear in the sky; that she is allowed to see this spectacle gives her the feeling of being chosen."
Unica Zürn "The Jasmine Man" 1970
Unica Zürn "Oracle and Spectacle" 1960
"Sometimes we say, 'I can't believe my eyes.' But we do, even when what we see amazes us to no end. We are used to relying on our eyes, our ears, and we usually take what they tell us as granted. So what do we do when we see something we know deep down that it can't be?"
Arnhild Lauveng "Tomorrow I was crazy: a journey into schizophrenia" 2019
Jane Gaverole "Le chant du Cigne"
"I closed my eyes to escape from all this agitation surrounding me and of which I was the center. But I found no rest: for horrible images assailed me, so vivid that I felt real sensations in my body. I cannot say that I really saw images, they were not representations. I rather felt them. Thus it seemed to me that I had a mouthful of birds that I crunched and that choked me with their feathers, their crushed bones and their blood. Or I would see people locked in milk cans and rotting, and I would devour those rotting corpses. It was horrible. Or I would devour the head of a cat, which itself would devour me inside."
M.A. Sechehaye "Diary of a Schizophrenic” 1950
Leonor Fini, “Love Without Reservations”, 1956