Luise (2021)
LUISE
A performance and film project by artist Katrina McPherson.
Luise , a vibrant woman in her prime, navigates living in Berlin during World War 2 with two daughters and a mounting knowledge of her husband's infidelity. In the darkest of conceivable winters after VE Day, where everything is laid bare and Germany's actions are made irrefutable, every citizen is now a refugee in the newly despised land. Against this backdrop, German-born Luise one morning takes herself off to the coast, walks into the sea and doesn’t come back.
Seventy-five years later, artist Katrina McPherson, Luise's granddaughter, and herself mother of three daughters, sets out to meet Luise through the photographs that remain of her. Katrina’s hope is to find ways in which she can piece together who her grandmother was, what her experience of life might have been, and what it feels like to be in her body.
(Text by Tanya Ronder and Katrina McPherson Feb 2020; updated by Katrina McPherson, June 2021)
My appointment as Dance Base Associate Artist and as Dance North Artists in 2019 gave me pause to think about what it is that I would do were I to pursue a solo film work which I both perform and direct – a ‘non-collaboration’ project as it were. The idea that came to the fore was also by far the most personal work that I have ever embarked on: Taking as my starting point the remaining photographs of my German maternal grandmother – a war refugee mother-of two who died in 1946 by drowning herself – I set out to develop a new film work.
One strand of this was to be a new body of original screendance material, created through my performing for the camera a choreography of gestures, stances, and imagined movements – forming a kind of ‘embodied DNA’ – that pose questions of identity, physical and emotional legacy.
The idea builds on my on-going interest in the fluid potential of the empathetic camera and reflects a tested tradition of women artists featuring their own bodies – and stories – in their screen-based work. It also builds on my more recent collaborative works we record ourselves (2016) and Paysages Mixtes/Mixtes Landscapes(2019), films in which my co-performers and I step out from behind the camera and in doing so, reconsider ideas of agency and challenge traditional hierarchies of production.
The practice that I started with in the studio was to assume the position that Luise is in at the moment when the photograph was taken and to try to experience the potential of that moment. What can that reveal about what she experienced? How does it move me? Where does it take me? How does it change my understanding of my grandmother?
There is something intriguing about the relationship of the still photograph and the narrative of a person’s life, and how a moment in time might be expanded in some many different directions. In a photo we glimpse a fragment of a second and wonder what happened in the few moments before and after that moment. We might think about this moment having depth, as well as linearity and ask: What was happening on different levels at that moment in time? How did it sound? How did it feel? How did it smell? Who was around about? How were they moving – towards, away from that moment? Who was behind the camera? Who was out of frame?
When I spent time embodying Luise as depicted in some of the photographs, I begin to realise that in every image she is in relation to someone else. Even in the photos where she is alone, there is someone behind the camera at whom she is smiling – or not. In most of the photos, she is with at least one other person, sometimes two or more. Luise seems always to be looking at the camera and therefore at the person behind the camera. Might she also be looking at the people who will look at the photo and, in that way, also looking at me, her granddaughter?
“I feel that Luise was aware of being photographed. Perhaps she’s even a bit suspicious of the camera? I think that she also took photographs herself and I believe that she saved the family photos when they fled Berlin in 1945.”
Katrina, Notebook, October 2019.
