Film premiere
Image: A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift, production still from HD video, Elisabeth Von Samsonow, 2021
TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture with support from the French Embassy in Ireland present:
A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift
Film premiere
16 April 2021, 9pm
A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift is a new film commission curated by Kate Strain. Evolving through many iterations, A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift is a collaborative film by Austrian artist and philosopher Elisabeth von Samsonow and commissioned artists Ruby Wallis and Michaele Cutaya, Michelle Doyle, Ruth Le Gear, Marielle MacLeman, Naïmé Perrette, Liliane Puthod, Sara Sadik.
The film gathers contributions from each artist, through film, sculpture, music, sound and design, and uses collaged footage to investigate our access to nature through poetry. The codes that we as humans attempt to decipher - trees / alphabet / place, the inherent wisdom of the open air, and how to share it between practices and disparate geographic locations is a central theme of the film. Elisabeth von Samsonow is interested in the role of the White Goddess, and the Deep Ecology movement. Seeking to create poetry from the forest, she created an alphabet based on trees native to both Ireland and Austria.
"How to do an art project with people involved in different countries during a pandemic? The lockdown can also be taken as another word for territorialisation as everybody had to stay right in their place. Territorialisation, unintentional or intentional, means coming-backto-one’s world, to reattach oneself to a segment of the world. Instead of all meeting together in the region of Galway, we started to rethink Ireland, where we did not go, in Lower Austria. We had wanted to give shape to our project through the old Irish alphabet of trees, Beth-Luis-Nion [also known as Ogham], which was widely commented on by Robert von Ranke-Graves in his voluminous book The White Goddess (1948). To this end we remapped the Land of the Goddesses, a highly diverse territory with vineyards, wood, field and bushland in Lower Austria. Filming in this context became a process of self-reflexion and awareness in relation to the perception of the land. Via the performances, the documentation of the land was freed from the historical stereotypes of ‘landscape’. The performative gaze on the land is more of a guerrilla type of solidarisation and reterritorialisation that can also be seen in the footage that was produced by the collaborating artists. A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift turned out to be a model of how to do journeys without moving.” Elisabeth von Samsonow
A Visit, A Ceremony, A Gift is an example of total field operation - exploring the relationships between diverse spaces and places at a time when physical contact and travel has become impossible. Curated by Kate Strain, edited by Eavan Aiken and produced by Anne Mullee, the film will premiere online on Friday 16th April at 9pm.
https://www.tulca.ie/a-visit-a-ceremony-a-gift
Register for tickets here
Commissioned by TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture.
(12‘, A 2020)
In this lecture-performance Elisabeth von Samsonow presents the key ideas of her eponymous book in a self-commenting hysterical attack. She shows how the figure of the girl represents not just the left-out, ephemeral, powerless neutrum in the family romance but turns out to be the core player in totemic transavantgarde. Mirroring and critizing concepts from the Deleuzian/ Guattarian Anti-Oedipus, Elisabeth von Samsonow's book Anti Electra unfolds how the substance of the girl - far beyond the reality of girlisms - fires contemporary media culture, gender concepts and today’s revisions of ontological positionalities.
The Brezel Goddess’ Lounge by Elisabeth von Samsonow shows two sculptures and drawings. The pretzel is present as an overarching mathematical form by which its inner relationships of forces become tangible. The Brezel Goddess herself proves to be a liminal figure between a banal everyday world (having pretzels every day) and a radical metaphysics of the production of bodies. The pretzel is the primary signature (a double helix in a crescent moon) of the kind of plasticity that must be taken as a requisite when dealing with the body. The pretzel is the favorite object of sculptors and theorists who explore bodies producing bodies (also: mother, the future of bodies). The exercise machine repurposed as a Doe Bride (created for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich) serves as a contemporary meditation machine in this context. A little prayer book with pretzel mantras will be published in conjunction with this event.
A special edition is brought out by Gallery Andrea Juenger Vienna on the occasion of the exhibition „Th Parents‘ Bedroom Show“ by Elisabeth von Samsonow and Juergen Teller at Spazio Ridotto/ Zuecca Project Space Venice 2019.
PRESENTATION OF THE CATALOGUE 
5.10.2018 - 27.1.2019 - Thursday, 4th of October 2018, 7pm
The works by Sarah Decristoforo, Fabiana Faleiros, Alex Martinis Roe, Elisabeth von Samsonow and Ashley Hans Scheirl, most of which were realized specifically for this exhibition, generate non-normative experiments of sex in drawing, sculpture, video, sound and installation. What kind of visualizations, embodiments, apparatuses, settings, texts and tutorials permit us to anticipate a sexual economy that is based on excessive exchange and radical solidarity? How could we effectively edit the scripts of our sexual identities? What roles are played by prosthetic devices and hormones, citations and yoga, over-expenditure and waste, the clitoris and digital interfaces in this process? 
28.9.2018-10.3.2019
