Blanka Győri

During the two months of the residency I would be working on an artist book consisting of fragments of texts, my own writings, parts of interviews, photos and drawings. The topic of the book is bodily experiences and body memory. In the last years I have learned the techniques of narrative interview. I interwieved nude models working at different drawing classes. In the process of this kind of in-depth interview the interviewee is asked to tell his/her life the way he/she experienced it. I only asked questions to help the other to speak as easily as it is possible, I didn’t suggest any linear approach or any topics to focus on.

In the book I would use parts of the interviews, those that are connected to working as a model and experiences from each models’ childhood that still affect the behaviour of the adult person. The story fragments will be mixed up with my own notes, drawings and theoretical texts reflecting on the body. Some drawings from anatomy class students would also be inculded.

Planning this book I was searching identity and self-narration, the methods that help us to create our own special life story, with a beginning and a certain logic that leads to our present state. I suggest that the feeling that we are in harmony with our place in the world or not is mainly based on bodily experiences. The dynamism of being present and losing presence as an adult is affected by our relations to our parents at an early age. Deepening my knowledge I searched for authors dealing with similar questions: Alice Miller (For Your Own Good), poems by Szilárd Borbély, Paul Ricœur (Oneself as Another), Bergson (Time and Free Will), Imre Kertész (Fiasco)

When I applied for the residency announced by Q21, I planned to work on an artist book containing drawings, photos, and fragments of an in-depth inteview I made with a nude model.  During my stay in Vienna I had time to start a research on identity and self-narration. I bought Fukuyama’s recently published book, ‘Identity’ which formed the way I was thinking about the subject. I re-read and watched some novels and movies which had great impact on me as a child, and was thinking about how I made unconscious analogues between the fictional characters and people of my real life. I read once again Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good and started to make some sketches. I spoke a lot with my boyfriend who was reading Dante’s Inferno at that time, and during the long skype calls I made some sketches of the structure of this space the way Dante described it.

I had the opportunity to practice German, I read Herztier from Herta Müller, who writes so precisely about how people living in authoritarian systems internalize power and hierarchical patterns into their intimate lives.

I was wandering around Vienna a lot and liked it more and more, the calmness of the city which  helped me to focus on my research. I enjoyed very much that I could visit some exhibitions several times. As I remember I went three times to the Dom Museum’s Family Matters exhibition, I saw the Alex Katz room at Albertina’s contemporary collection more than once and I could see some early works of Klee at Leopold Museum.

The Jewish Museum invited us as resident artists for a guided tour and we saw that the first object in the exhibition was a gun, owned illegally for a long time by the son of a Shoah survivor – as our guide told us, for defending his family in any case. It was surprising to see this in a museum, because I know people in Budapest, who are thinking very similarly.

I got to know some of the other resident artists and we went to openings and concerts together. At the end of my stay I got to know a curator and an artist residing in Vienna, it makes me feel whenever I will be in the city I will have some friends to connect with.