A Tone to Play – Abc According to Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan

You
You teach
You teach your hands
You teach your hands you teach
You teach your hands
to sleep*

Victoria Pihl Lind’s exhibition A Tone to Play – Abc According to Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan is inspired by the lifelong correspondence between the two poets. The letters express a complete fusion of life and art, an emotional and intellectual act.

Ingeborg Bachmann (b. 1926 Austria) and Paul Celan (b.1920 Ukraine) are regarded as two of the most influential post-war European poets. Pihl Lind has managed to liberate the work from the most acute biographical and historical weight, focusing on concerns of her own time. In the films language, time and subjectivity is processed side by side with the correspondence and poetry of Bachmann and Celan.

The film in the first room, A Tone to Play – Abc According to Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, stages to short passages, chosen from hundreds of letters. One addresses the concept of time, while the other deals with Paul Celan’s perception of language, in particular the German language. The scene unfolds in a schoolyard.

“The characters are not trapped in tempus. Slowly and repetitively they express themselves about the essence of art. It is interesting that Celan, who lost his parents in the Holocaust, had such an open, or perhaps vertical engagement with language. He did not paint realistic pictures in his poetry. He created new concepts and images of becoming. The subjective gaze is absolutely central”, says Pihl Lind.

Jerry Bachmann, in the third room, is based upon a lecture by Ingeborg Bachmann held at the University in Frankfurt in 1959. The work encircles the relationship between life and art and questions the artist’s use of reality. The viewer encounters Bachmann’s text through the character Jerry Bachmann’s voice and gaze: “Because his focus is on the misfortunes of man and the disaster of the world, because he allows himself to look at the entire picture, it is apparently acceptable that even those things that could be changed, remain unchanged. He misses the point. One sees the froth from his mouth and applauds, nothing moves, only this fatal applause”.

Performers in the films are Tora Dalseng, Torbjørn M. Davidsen and Jimmie Jonasson.

*Paul Celan, 1959, from the poem by Matiére de Bretagne in the poetry collection Sprachgitter.