Mädchen Vivi V. 2
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Teresas, Essays on Escape is the latest series of works by experimental photographer and moving-image artist Mädchen Vivi. This interdisciplinary series, much like Mädchen’s previous works, incorporates elements of performance, documentary, montage, and creative writing into both photography and moving-image.
Conveyed through a lens of survival feminism, Teresas, Essays on Escape conceptually communicates escape from danger, particularly from patriarchal structures or elements. This research-based practice situates much like a performance, entailing three acts; recognizing the need to escape, rehearsing the escape, and carrying out the escape. While carrying the marks and scars of evading danger, the work follows a conceptual narrative portraying the journey of recognizing danger with the cognitive possibility of continuing to live.
In Teresas, Essays on Escape, much like her previous work, Mädchen Vivi uses symbolic feminine identifiers to behave as ‘actors’ within her compositions, such as lipstick, lingerie, and the pink flower. These markers symbolize the figure engaged in exposure and protection, delicacy and alertness. Mädchen Vivi often juxtaposes the color pink against images of steel, which represents a dichotomy between sensitivity, lightness, desire, freedom, imagination, and affection aligned with weight, restraint, hardness, and confinement. The contrast between light and heavily elements within her work portrays fragility and potency, between what floats and what restricts.
Conceptually, the series illuminates visuals based on a state of heightened awareness, courage, and speed amidst the machinations of imminent danger. Teresas, Essays on Escape investigates escape as a sociological method of survival and language of the body refusing to correlate with violence. As scars and wounds emerge, the works portray marks of the journey through ‘aesthetics of escape’, of not just signs of trauma, but also as evidence a passage has taken place, and as a result, the body has endured, becoming reinvented within the world.
From observation, we will note the level of confrontation and provocation within the works, such as lingerie being filmed and photographed, suspended from a high-rise apartment patio railing. The way Mädchen Vivi photographs and films the lingerie appears much like voyeurism, as she captures the interior in photography with transparent linen curtains slightly concealing the scene, and zooming in on film from ground level, revealing a pixelated surveillance appearance. Further, scenes of wailing or self-restraint amidst performances of guitar ‘harp playing’ against moving-image or frolicing in dance-like poses within a dirty public restroom, convey an emotional rejection of trauma.
Some of the more confrontational works invoke a woman’s foot slightly entering the composition completely wrapped in opaque black pantyhose with a silver stiletto and stepping on a razor blade. Another work reveals a ‘disturbed totem’ complete with a wig and lingerie juxtaposed against the artist wrapping her head within the interior of a closed bra. These themes especially best convey Mädchen Vivi’s use of horror elements to portray concepts of confinement and despair amidst patriarchal institutional structures, systems, and experiences.
Mädchen Vivi’s portfolio represents identity personified and conceptualized through heightened senses of individuality and unrestrained passion amidst the vast complexities of the contemporary digital era. Her experimental approaches and conceptual narratives portray a nightmarish world which is both frightening and liberating. Mädchen Vivi frees the mind of the viewer to confront the darkest parts of society, such as patriarchal cultural and institutional norms, and creates visual fragments which collectively inspire us to face the impending threats which face us, both direct and indirect. With immense fearlessness and visual complexity, the experimental photography and moving-images of Mädchen Vivi provide solace amidst danger and confrontation against tyranny.
