Chaosmos of the Personal
This artistic research is dedicated to a number of historical national socialist texts written by women and thus also more generally to the question of the roles of women in National Socialism. The focus is on writings by Nanna Conti (*1881), so-called Reichshebammenführerin, the leading midwife in the German Reich, and her daughter Camilla Nissen (*1902), a convinced National Socialist. The familial connection of the researcher, as a descendant of these two women, is explicitly desired and an important element of the inquiry. How can the affects and emotional inheritances that arise in confrontation with National Socialist perpetratorship in one’s own family history, be made visible and perceptible within the framework of artistic research? For this purpose, the above mentioned texts will be experimentally examined in the context of ethnopsychoanalytical interpretation workshops, their results will then be scrutinized again and aesthetically processed in their transfer into artistic productions.
Since her studies in film and media art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Universidad Nacional de Colombia (DAAD) and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Lena Ditte Nissen has been working as artistic researcher and filmmaker at the intersection of documentary and performative practice with reference to classical experimental film and ethnological research strategies. Her films, performances and installations have been shown in international institutions and film festivals: among others Museo de Arte Moderno Rio de Janeiro, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Museo del Banco de la República Bogotá, Film Museums in Frankfurt and Düsseldorf, KAI10 Arthena Foundation, Rubenstein Art Center, Intl. Film Festival Edinburgh, DOK Leipzig, CPH: DOX, 25FPS Zagreb, Festival de nouveau cinéma Montréal, Anthology Film Archive NYC. In 2021/22 Lena is a fellow at the Paul Klee Summer Academy in Bern, Switzerland, and in 2022 she received the prestigious annual workin grant of Stiftung Kunstfonds. In the winter semester 2022/23 she was ÖAW/IFK_Junior Fellow, currently she is on maternity leave and the fellowship is therefore interrupted.
Wie gehen wir heute mit den in Schweigen gehüllten nationalsozialistischen Täterschaften unserer Vorfahren um? In Konfrontation mit Texten aus der eigenen Familie wird in dieser künstlerisch-wissenschaftlichen Forschung mit Fokus auf Frauen als Täterinnen die ethnopsychoanalytische Methode der Deutungswerkstatt experimentell auf die Probe gestellt.