Mara Mattuschka

Mara Mattuschka / Chris Haring: Burning Down the Palace (INDEX 038)

| Tyran Grillo

The collaborations between Mara Mattuschka and choreographer Chris Haring unfold in what Mattuschka calls an “inner time,” a realm in which duration is elastic, language unreliable, and form caught between its own imperatives and the pressures of cultural inscription. These darkly comic and disturbingly intimate films speak a vocabulary of incomplete sentences, glitched vocalizations, uncanny gestures, and bodies imitating their own existence. The effect is that of an audiovisual terrain in which identity becomes a form of atmospheric drift rather than a stable category, and every movement, no matter how spastic or hesitant, registers as both confession and critique.

Part Time Heroes (2007), shot in an empty Viennese department store, places performers Stephanie Cumming, Ulrika Kinn Swensson, Johnny Schoofs, and Giovanni Scarcella inside a maze of dressing rooms, the kind of liminal cubicles where self-presentations are supposedly perfected, standardized, and groomed for consumption. In place of that promise, speech collapses into stutters and half-thoughts, the microphone an extension of the nervous system rather than a transmitter of clarity. Stephanie Cumming’s voice warps in pitch as she declares, “You could never, ever imagine how it is to be me,” a sentence that shudders under its own burden. The store’s PA system broadcasts a man’s disembodied fantasies about personal space and access while the performers’ movements defy normative choreography.

A woman undresses in a gold-leafed room, but the action refuses voyeuristic logic. Jagged and interrupted, she radiates both resistance and vulnerability. Another flexes in a mirror, adopting a male voice to brag about Cameron Diaz, rubbing the microphone against her clothing to amplify the friction of fabric against skin. So begins a chameleon’s game, with each performer trying on and discarding selves like yesterday’s discount rack. Even interaction becomes a form of dissociation. A man calls a woman on the phone but can speak only through technological mediation, misgendering her in the process, until he catches himself mid-sentence and briefly confronts his own absurdity. “Real stars shine only at night,” someone says, as if to reassure these drifting figures that obscurity is its own form of luminosity.

The emotional pivot arrives when Ulrika guides Stephanie and Johnny toward mutual recognition. She commands them to look into each other’s eyes and to listen to each other’s bodies. For one moment, care feels possible before its coherence dissolves. Voices break again, and images fracture in reflective surfaces. Giovanni emerges from his elevator only to be met with Ulrika’s shriek. Stephanie impersonates Johnny over the radio while he mouths her words perfectly, a duet of dislocation performed against a backdrop of store windows meant for display but now showcasing only fragmentation.

Running Sushi (2008) flings its protagonists into a pop-inflected, manga-tinged Eden that reimagines domestic life as a conveyor belt of images and half-digested memories. Stephanie Cumming and Johnny Schoofs inhabit a cartoonish household powered by manic whimsy. Eve eats an orange peel whole, every scrape and chew amplified with grotesque clarity. Adam recoils from behaviors he cannot explain and hyperventilates himself into animality. Their conversations veer from banal domestic choices, such as what color to paint the kitchen, to sudden eruptions about sexual assault and the enslavement of domestic expectations. Yet the film refuses tragedy. It vacillates between slapstick and trauma, between whispered tenderness and squeals at their own nakedness. The appearance of Eve’s chopstick-wielding alter ego, puncturing the veneer of calm, is an eruption from a psyche with a backstage pass. The two end on the floor, singing to a ukulele, a moment of fragile equilibrium in a world where even sincerity feels like performance.

Burning Palace (2009), the darkest and most erotically charged of the trilogy, moves into the lush corridors of Vienna’s Hotel Altstadt. Red curtains invite comparisons to David Lynch, even though the film’s deeper kinship lies with Philippe Grandrieux. Bodies press against surfaces until they warp, voices distort into pleas, moans, and chants. Stephanie’s slowed-down narration lingers on the intricacies of a woman’s pleasure while naked men skitter through hotel rooms and hide behind magazines. Screams in the hallway are trapped between floors of desire and despair. Mock-operatic performances unravel as voices warp until the boundaries between song and wail thaw. Scenes of women feeling their own pleasure, either alone or together, alternate with men muttering non sequiturs and avoiding narrative continuity or emotional labor. A pop song melts into slowed oblivion, liquefying in response to the bodies onscreen. Laughter, ambiguous and uncanny, leaves us unable to tell whether release or derangement has been offered.

The accompanying documentary, Burning Down the Palace: The Making of Burning Palace (2011), shows how such controlled chaos arises from trust, improvisation, and risk. It confirms what the trilogy already demonstrates: the body, pushed to its limits, can overturn every lie we tell ourselves about the shape of things when its aura is sucked in through the mouth and expelled in a single twitch of authenticity.

Mara Mattuschka: Iris Scan (INDEX 006)

| Tyran Grillo

Mara Mattuschka’s entrance into the world of cinema feels less like a debut and more like a detonation of everything the frame assumes about humanity, language, and the permeable membrane that binds them. Born in 1959 in Sofia, Bulgaria, she uprooted herself at 17 and resettled in Vienna, a city of German syllables at first beyond her command. While acclimating to her new environment, she felt her native words eroding, slipping into an interior exile. What disappeared in speech resurfaced in image, as visual media became the refuge through which she could still articulate her thoughts. She began with short films (“epigrams,” “aphorisms,” and “two-liners”), each a tight blast of vision that compressed poetry into movement. And from the outset, she conjured an alter ego for the screen: Mimi Minus, a persona equal parts mask and reveal.

Gifted mathematically, Mattuschka also studied painting and animation under Maria Lassnig at the University for Applied Arts, where she learned that the flesh could be a medium as honest as pigment. “I use my body as an instrument,” she says. “It is brush, pencil, and thought.” Yet she resists classification as a breaker of taboos, which remain surface-level distractions from the deeper strata where psychological necessity meets material expression. Sex, in her universe, is rarely sex but an assimilation, something closer to action painting than transgression. Her films teem with this notion of “non-verbal understanding,” a physical comprehension of the world that predates and outlives the almighty utterance.

This early philosophy materializes vividly in Nabelfabel (NavelFable, 1984), in which Mattuschka stages a second birth through pairs of tights in what amounts to a ritual and a comedy rolled together into one. Magazine mouths, newspaper masks, notebook-paper credits: all media collapse as she plunges her head into the nylon cocoon and wrestles her way out by means of lips, tongue, and face. Negative images flare; lines are drawn and abandoned. The sound skitters as a distressed record, a creation myth in the form of a self-portrait.

Meanwhile, mischief abounds in Cerolax II (1985), a commercial break from the world’s unconscious, with Mimi Minus hawking a brain-cleaning agent. Writing in black ink on a mirror, she makes herself surface and solvent. Skin becomes animation cel; sprays and marks imply a purging from within, a shedding of psychological residue—“lax” as laxative, but for thought.

In Der Untergang der Titania (The Sinking of Titania, 1985), Mattuschka turns the titular goddess into an outcast, imagining her not as a symbol of fulfilled love but as a woman whose power stems from unrealized desire. A bathtub that should drain becomes fertile instead, filling with ink that shrouds sexuality in shadow. Titania bites an apple, muses on the absence of love, and paints a pear instead. “No one,” she insists, “can understand love better than a woman who may be enjoying it for the first time.” Longing, here, is its own gravitational field.

Likeminded interplay of embodiment and machinery pulses in Kugelkopf (Ball-Head, 1985), Mattuschka’s “Ode to IBM,” where she becomes a typewriter made of flesh. With Carmen blaring, her shaved and bandaged head becomes a stamping device, printing letters and bull’s horns in a swirl of bravado, a typewriter ribbon serving as the matador’s scarf. And outside the window, life ambles on, unaware of the performance above, an oblivious world moving in quiet amnesia.

Mattuschka’s fascination with systems culminates in Pascal-Gödel (1986), a meditation on the union of numerators and denominators. Mimi plays chess on graph paper against her own negative double. Wine pours and reverses with melodramatic impossibility. Ink seeps across the board, thought overrunning form. Silence becomes the only language capable of holding such an equation.

That tension between interior and exterior bodies shifts into nervous-system poetics in Parasympathica (1986), where sweat, tears, ejaculate, and vaginal fluid become a painterly palette. As a male voice muses about butterflies, Mattuschka appears in stark black and white, hovering somewhere between nature documentary and dreamscape. Protection and compromise blur, holding the question open.

Childhood curiosity takes on unsettling pliability in Les Miserables (1987), animated with water-soluble pigments and the artist’s own saliva. A boy and a girl wander in search of another girl, whose genitalia prompts the question, “Is that real?” Her violation reduces her to vowels, a prelinguistic utterance that is less than language. Set in the impossible year 1001, the film warns that “hearing and sight are easy to blight.” Innocence and injury fold into each other, Mattuschka’s sealing the sequence.

That same year yields Danke, es hat mich sehr gefreut (I Have Been Very Pleased), a hyper-bright faux fashion advertisement shot on a radioactive beach, where she pleasures herself as the camera steadily withdraws. Her climax dissolves into electronic distortion—witchlike, feral, uncontainable.

The dissolution of language becomes literal in Kaiser Schnitt (Caesarean Section, 1987), where alphabet soup becomes an anatomical cipher. While she cooks, an EKG line animates across paper. Utensils transform into surgical instruments; the body becomes a site where text is extracted. Mattuschka slices open an ink-filled slit, removes letters with tweezers, and arranges them through a visceral surgery.

In its aftermath, motherhood becomes both a burden and a creative engine in Der Schöne, die Biest (Beauty and the Beast, 1993). A figure climbs a hill, possibly carrying a newborn. Scenes of feeding, climbing, dressing up, reciting poems, and playing a stringless violin evoke a life pulled between creation and constraint. She emerges through a tunnel of cars, as if re-entering the world after an inner voyage.

Her 1993 S.O.S. Extraterrestria turns this negotiation outward, connecting modesty and destructiveness through unseen pipes that thread humanity’s waste beneath the surface. Covered in tights, she regards herself in the mirror, tuned to radio transmissions. Trying on clothing becomes existential calibration. She plays Godzilla, lays waste to a city through superimposition, mates with the Eiffel Tower, and is electrocuted; her voice remains half-formed, exploratory, testing the edges of articulation as everything burns around her.

A decade later, ID (2003) plunges into the horror of doppelgängers, mating, and cannibalism. Her voice drones in wordless surges as her face morphs into its own Other, the self dividing and devouring self on a never-ending escalator.

And somewhere at the center of it all sits the modest bonus piece “Ahm…”, a brief self-presentation in which Mattuschka faces the camera and utters only that single suspended syllable. Forever on the verge of speech but withholding the utterance, she captures a moment both uncomfortable and profound, a miniature manifesto of hesitation, possibility, and the unsaid.

Across these works, a single principle emerges: Mattuschka inhabits the body not as a subject but as an instrument that produces meaning through gesture, residue, and metamorphosis. Her films do not break conventions so much as dissolve the structures that make them legible in the first place. What remains is a site of simultaneous vulnerability and invention.

Mattuschka’s cinema suggests that identity is always in revision, never a noun but a verb that bargains with the world’s materials. Her forms multiply, distort, leak, and reform, questioning whether language belongs to the self or vice versa. Meaning begins long before we learn to speak and continues long after words fail. She is an archive, a painter’s brush, a battlefield, an oracle, the first medium and the last. She reminds us that being human means being perpetually unfinished, always pushing against the skin of our own becoming, always trying to articulate something just beyond what we can say. Which is why we are only left with her looking into the camera and saying, “Ahm…” It is the sound of art beginning again.