Manuela Viezzer

The project Eat me eat me not - art games for 'making kin' is part of a long-term artistic research practice broadly exploring ethical and epistemological questions of how to live harmoniously as a multispecies in a rapidly changing and deteriorating world.

More information here.

2022. Installation and performative exercise, wooden blocks, paper infinity cubes, keywords.

All Under One Sky, a performative exercise by Manuela Viezzer and Ganesh Nepal, explores how a cosmopolitan community can be imagined through active listening and critical self reflection. Maybe caring for the other and becoming responsible in the sense of making the other able to respond is what is needed to create a ground for article 1 of the Dutch constitution to become really meaningful, overcoming equality towards equity.

Literally `cosmopolitan’ means `citizen of the world’ from the Greek κόσμος (kosmos) meaning `world’ or `universe’, and πολίτης (politês) meaning `citizen’. Cosmopolitanism is therefore the idea that all human beings belong to a single community. By extension, it is the idea that all living beings belong to a single community.

The phrase `all under one sky’ is inspired by the Chinese concept of tiānxià (天下), which is sometimes used to translate `cosmopolitanism’. Literally 天下 means `all that is under the sky’, hence the world, the whole world. In this context, we like it in the form 天下众生 (tiānxià zhòngshēng) which means `all living beings under the sky’.

The constitution can be seen as a bond between state and nation, but what is a nation? Benedict Anderson characterizes a `nation’ as an `imagined political community’ because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”. In a sense, a community can be `imagined’ as in `not real’. But in a different sense, a community can be `imagined’ as in `the result of an imaginative process’. Anderson explains how this imaginative process has been working so far, through similar or shared interests and above all through a shared language. But there is no intrinsic limitation on how this imaginative process could be performed.

Maybe a cosmopolitan community should be imagined through active listening and critical self reflection. Maybe caring for the other and becoming responsible in the sense of making the other able to respond is what is needed to create a ground for article 1 to become really meaningful. Caring for the other is needed to move from equality to equity.

Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome equal in front of the law

Social systems aren’t naturally inequitable — they’ve been intentionally designed to reward specific demographics for so long that the system’s outcomes may appear unintentional but are actually rooted in discriminatory practices and beliefs.

To achieve equity, equal treatment is usually not enough. Instead, everyone should be treated justly according to their circumstances. Equality has to do with `the same amount’. Equity has to do with `fairness, impartiality and justice.’ so, being treated equally vs being treated fairly.

The complication with equity is that people often disagree on what is “just” or “fair.” These are subjective concepts and, as a result, laws and policies that attempt to achieve equity are often controversial.

In our performative exercise we explore how a critical community can be created, and then suggest that maybe a truly cosmopolitan nation should be constructed as a critical community.

Our approach for this performative exercise is based on the research works of Benedict Anderson (on nationalism), Peter Block and Silvia Cristina Bettez (on social justice and pedagogy). We have also been inspired by Training for not yet.

Photo credits: Alëna Vinokurova and Chun Yao Lin

Here you can download my thesis.

a collaboration between Manuela Viezzer and Annebeth Erdbrink

As part of her final exam for the master in Fine Arts and Design, Manuela Viezzer (HKU) created the installation/sculpture Promise Me (2019), an art work which also functions as a game, to be played by the artist and curious spectators. Promise Me involves themes of animal rights and veganism, and its background context is a critique of the concept of animals as “livestock.” In collaboration with game researcher Annebeth Erdbrink (TU Delft), an artistic research project is now set up to explore to what extent the game in its artistic embedding can create awareness amongst its players concerning the animal exploitation in the food industry and awake their personal responsibility for the continuation of it.

the research question

how it started

the impact on artistic research

the scientific background

behind the scenes

2019

Promise me is a sculptural object but it is also a game, that is played by me, and those in the audience that are also willing to play, during a show. As part of the game, players are asked to make promises to perform a certain behavior in the near future, involving eating patterns (like “I promise you I will not eat meat for 3 days” or “I promise you I will try a vegan drink.”)

A considerable impact on the environment is made by the production of meat and dairy products, and it is very likely that by the end of this century the consumption of meat will need to be drastically reduced or altogether halted, in order to decrease global farmland use and the connected production of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Becoming vegan is a solution, but it involves radical changes in people behavior and dietary patterns. Can art play a role in raising awareness and lead an audience smoothly through a behavioral change?

At the beginning of the II treatise of “The Genealogy of Morals”, Nietzsche writes that man is a promising animal, an animal that is permitted to make promises and able to hold on to them. With this in mind, I developed an artwork / game where players can win by making a promise to change, even for a short time, their eating patterns.

The initial concept for this work was made with paper, but the final work has been realized in earthenware and porcelain. The cards are made combining 80 g/m2 drawing paper with a thicker, canvas-like handmade paper, which I myself produced several years ago, in a workshop on paper making. The evolution of the game on the board constitutes a set of possible realization of the artwork itself, imagined as an interaction between the artist and her public.

2019

Amuse-gueules is a sculptural object, consisting of a dining table set with human body parts cast in porcelain and presented as food. Most casts are from my own body: my face, my right and left hand fingers, my toes, my ears, my breast, but also a heart and a brain (from life size medical models.) All the casts are arranged on the plates, and not fused with them, so that the body parts can be examined and manipulated.

2017 - 2019

Brainmeatwashing consists of a series of sketches visualizing a succession of four spaces / rooms through which I am imagining the audience to follow an obligatory path, each room representing a sort of emblematic step in the food chain. Taken together, the four spaces are meant to constitute a large Pavlovian conditioning structure, which will induce in the unaware spectators / participants a conditioned nausea  at the sight / smell of meat. For obvious reasons, the project remains as a sketch, impossible to realise. To “brainwash” means to pressurize someone into adopting some radically different beliefs, by using systematic and often forcible means. Often, the idea is to attempt, through prolonged stress, to break down an individual physical and mental defenses. The indoctrination performed by brainwashing is usually associated with military and political interrogations, and with religious conversion. Pavlovian conditioning can also be seen as a form of brainwashing. The reference to brainwashing in my art project is meant to highlight the fact that, as an artist, I am imagining to use some form of violence on the viewer, to force a change in beliefs. 

The first room, the Labyrinth, involves restraints on the body, mimicking the restraints that livestock suffer during their short existence. The second room, the Foul Room, involves display and contact with bodily wastes, to mimic the degradation imposed on livestock because of overcrowding. The third room, the Kill Floor, will make the viewer experience the act of slaughtering. The fourth room, the Dinner Table, involves the display of the results of the slaughtering as dead matter / food. 

Overall, the work aims at denouncing the atrocities perpetrated with the ‘machinization’ of the animals employed in the human food chain, possibly generating in the viewer an overwhelming feeling of disgust. The message that I would like to pass on the viewer is that, whenever meat is involved, the human food chain shows traits of abjection. The production of meat involves abject processes and the result of an abject act of production keeps an halo of abjection around it. Whenever we consume such a result, it becomes literally part of us, and the halo of abjection becomes part of us too.

2018

A collaboration between Nandini Hasija and Manuela Viezzer, with the participation of Cody Takacs.

Usually humans choose trees because of how trees look above the ground. They rarely pay attention to tree roots. But roots are vital for the tree, so from the tree point of view roots have at least the same if not a larger significance than the canopy. The Ginkgo biloba in the Oude Hortus was planted around 1750 and is the oldest one in Europe. It is an impressive tree and by choosing to work with it we had the opportunity to collaborate with the botanical garden of Utrecht.

The project involved a two-months researching on the Ginkgo, and resulted in a site-specific installation in the Oude Hortus, illustrating the root system of the old Ginkgo tree that lives there. The woven sculptures of Nandini have been installed at the base of the tree, and also hanging from its branches, representing both the underground roots of the tree and its ability to form aerial roots.

All the scientific information that I gathered on the Ginkgo became the scaffolding for a story that I wrote taking the point of view of the tree. The story has then been used by Nandini and myself to loosely inspire the production of collages and drawings. These materials have also been used within the installation, arranged along the path to the tree, guiding the audience towards the tree and providing a sort of commentary on what was about to be seen.

Part of the story (the words that I imagined to be actually spoken by the tree) has been cut out and arranged in a single long line, that has been laid down on the path towards the tree starting roughly at the point where the tree root system extend (some 18 meters from the center of the tree trunk.) Approaching the tree, the story line has been merged with the woven roots.

Since one of the most recent discoveries in plant biology concerns the abilities of trees to use sounds to communicate (acoustic waves dispersed through the soil), Cody Takacs, a freelance bass player, has been invited to participate with an improvisation on sounds that have the same frequency range as those used by plants.

2018

Now eat me results from an exploration of porcelain body casts. One day, while making a porcelain cast of my own face, I extracted the porcelain from the mold too early so that, instead of keeping its shape, it flattened on the table giving the impression of skin taken away from my face. It immediately made me think of a slice of ham, but coming from myself instead of a pig. This gave me the idea for a subsequent work: a plate, decorated with small pig figurines, and my ‘porcelain skin’ in the middle, like a sort of human ham slice. I immediately perceived the work as connected to the conceptual process of denaturalising the concept of animal. I also perceived it as connected to the critique of carnivore food that I have in mind. I decided therefore to produce a small series small series of works involving the casts of my hand and my fingers, and to present them on plates, as food.

In a very general way of speaking, I am interested in contents that are qualified as ‘disturbing’.

The words disturbing / disturbance / disturb are related because they belong to the same word family, whose lexical root is turb- modified by adding the dis- prefix. In the noun phrase ‘disturbing contents’, the present participle disturbing acts as an adjective, conveying the meaning of causing anxiety, fear, horror.

The English terms anxiety and angst, together with the French anxiété, the Italian ansia, the German angst and the Dutch angst, all share the same etymology and derive from the Latin verb angō,angis,ānxī,actum,ángere, meaning to press tightly; when of the throat, to strangle, throttle hence tighten, suffocate, and therefore indicating the painful feeling of tightening at the epigastrium, with difficulty of breath and deep sadness which characterizes anxiety. The Italian paura and French peur (both meaning fear) derive from the Latin paveo, hence have a link with being beaten, and with shock; we can therefore take them to mean the shock that infuses the tremor of terror. The English fear has a different etymology: from the Old English fǣr meaning calamity, danger, it refers to the objective side of the anxiety feeling, to what is out there in the world and may cause it. The terms horror, orrore, horreur instead bring us back to the subjective side: from the Latin horrere, a misspelling of horsere, meaning to be rough, bristling, they are used when speaking of animals whose hair stand up in fear. Hence, they refer to the physical sensations that make the skin crawl and the hair bristles, sensations caused by something terrible or cruel.

If the relation with anxiety, fear and horror gives the notion of disturbing a link to the physical sensation of suffocation and lack of breath, the feeling of being crushed, and the involuntary quivering movement of the hair or fur standing upright away from the skin, a closer look at the etymology of the word disturb gives an insight on the reasons behind such uneasiness.  The prefix dis- is an intensifier, meaning utterly. The root turb- means to break up or destroy the tranquillity or settled state of, from the Latin turba meaning confusion and derived from the Greek tyrbe, meaning disorder, confusion, commotion. It is the noisy disorder, the commotion of a multitude or a crowd, and derives from an older Sanskrit root tur- or tvar- with the original meaning of rapid movement. Disorder is the lack of order, the progressively being deprived of order. And order from Latin or-do combines the ending -do (working in this case functions as a formative element to produce a noun) with the root ar- or or-, which is common to several Latin and Greek words whose meaning is related to the idea of a way or manner to go, to proceed. Hence, order is the disposition of each thing in its place; the series or arrangement of things according to a concept (a rule); also, the disposition of things in the world as made by nature or by law. Because of the root tur- discussed above, in the turba the lack of order is brought forward by a rapid movement, which mixes up the natural positioning of worldly things.  

Bringing together all the above information, we can say that an analysis of the semantic field surrounding the term ‘disturbance’ provides a definition of ‘disturbing’ as: causing anxiety / fear / horror because of the breaking up of the expected, usual order (often understood as being the natural order of things.) When the broken order is the order of taste (in Latin, gustus) we have disgust; so disgusting is also a form of disturbing.

A series of 6 collage / mixed media works on paper, the giantesses are large female figures looking at or co-existing with elements from another world, in an attitude of melancholic longing or sensuous surrender; the nudes are drawn from life models.

This series of collages witnesses my fascination for the odd, weird and somehow eerie, which reminds me of the absurdity of the human condition. I honestly think that our condition is absurd because absurd is the tension between the lack of meaning of our existence and the search for meaning that characterizes the activity of our brain. We have created an infinity of tales, with the only objective of giving mankind a special place in the universe. But we are unsolved enigmas, and the world around us is a strange world. We fight to give sense to all that and this is the reason why we are encircled by tales and artworks. 

On the one hand, I strive to trap the viewer into my imaginary world and to confront him with a disturbing strangeness. On the other hand I feel that the trap works better if the depicted world is perceptibly credible. Hence the importance of the notion of space within my works. 

I often use collage as a technique, because it brings forward the dimension of tactility and texture within the work. I try to exploit a systematic association of antinomic forms as a way to capture and transmit a feeling of disturbance and disorientation. I am also gradually developing into a mixture of figurative and non-figurative elements, because a growing concern of my artistic practice is the way mark making contributes to depiction.

The line is the mark left by the pencil, the brush, the ink pen, the charcoal, with the expressiveness of all its different forms. I draw, both with pencils and scissors, and the pleasure taken in drawing is revealed by the sensibility and attention for the marks. Lines are delicate and surfaces are never completely solid. The paper is carefully manipulated, and different textures, densities and colours are exploited to enrich the image and provide a sense of depth. There is a conscious exploitation of the tension between opposites, so that the final composition plays upon the juxtaposition of elements, view points and techniques.

some investigations on white, loosely inspired by the work of robert ryman

white is the possibility of the image, but also an absence of colour that allows for the heightened visibility of texture and other material elements

I have a fascination for marks that has been left behind, often by children: I collect them, I re-work them, they are my visual basis and the point of departure of my artistic process. My work is a continuous process: old drawings of mine, children marks, left-overs are cut or thorn into pieces, fragments are analysed, dissected, brought together in a new way and then collated to generate a novel image. I am extremely interested in the process of unravelling and reconstructing which constitutes the ground for new images to arise.

I often find myself staring at scattered, not-yet-representational marks until they start moving around and start getting meaning, much like in the phenomena of pareidolia, a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Images are evoked almost automatically, the outcome is unexpected and the end result takes on a life of its own.

Some of my pencil drawings, made between 2010 and 2013.

The drawing paper is a surface open for scarification, the “act of covering with scratches or slight cuts”. The noun comes from the Old French scarification (1314), from Late Latin scarificationem, as a noun of action from Latinscarifare  meaning “to scratch open," from Greek skariphasthai “to scratch an outline, sketch," which in its turn derives from skariphos "pencil, stylus," containing the base *skribh- "to cut, separate, sift”. The semantic links are thus with scar but also with script in the sense of writing. The process of scarification may turn into a story, but I do not want to impose a story upon my works right from the beginning: I want them to remain somehow open, in order to allow, even invite the viewer to explore the narrative potential of their representations. There is no unambiguous tale to be told, though many possible stories are always suggested.