Sissi. Inhabitants
by Danilo Eccher

From Sissi: Abitanti, Mousse Publishing, Milan, 2012

She found herself donning the name of the Bavarian princess at the end of her first performance, Daniela ha perso il treno (Daniela Missed the Train), held in the Bologna railway station in 1999, when the artist, enveloped in a long dress made of used inner tubes from old trucks and tractors, attempted in vain to board trains through their narrow doors. That piece contained a series of absurd contrasts, violent short-circuits, brusque juxtapositions between the speed of the train and the clumsy bulk of the garment, between the implacable pragmatism of technology and the obsessive repetition of an absurd action, between the adventurous dream of a journey toward the future and the frustration of a joyful, destructive impossibility, a provocatively hopeless one.

A contradiction between the elegance of the act and the rough surface of the context, between the touching obsessiveness of the performance and the compositional rigidity of the scenic space. This performance not only introduces Sissi’s name, it presents a broad spectrum of the poetic horizon within which all of the artist’s work takes place. On the one hand, it shows the emergence of a performative plane that is immediately characterized by a distancing, a deliberate shunning of excessive conceptual discipline and chilly formal structure; there is no trace, in Sissi’s work, of the maniacal perfection of Vito Acconci or Bruce Nauman’s performances; no flirting with Gilbert & George's “Living Sculptures”; only a fragmentary, intermittent kinship with certain pieces by Marina Abramovic; almost none of the liberating irony of Fluxus. The current that ruffles the surface and breathes life into Sissi’s performances comes instead from the self-referential, classificatory obsessiveness of Kurt Schwitters; it can be glimpsed in the baroque perversions of Viennese Actionism and Hermann Nitsch in particular; one can feel a similar ambience in the chaotic disorder of Paul McCarthy or John Bock; and in any case, one must recognize a poetic affinity, and in some ways a formal one, with the work of Matthew Barney.

In both, personal experience becomes a creative testing ground, in both there is hallucinatory vision, in both one reads an obsessive, ego-centered form of writing. For Sissi, personal experience is not just a private storehouse from which to draw subtle inspiration, it is not just a muffling veil of memory under which differences are blurred and mitigated, it is not just an ambiguous curtain behind which to conceal one's own anxieties. Rather, for Sissi her own life is the central subject of her entire narrative; it is the psychoanalytic extension of her poetics: in the theme of the “cave” that becomes a “raft”, then turns into a “nest”, and later, a “cage”, there are formal variations on a need for protection that does not give way to pitying complacency, nor to frightened confusion; On the contrary, Sissi transfers this need for protection from a private sphere to one of public evocation, from an individual experience to a collective event, and to a symbolic necessity that restores a public relationship to the individual. This nocturnal dialectic between personal experience and collective needs makes up most of Sissi’ s artistic vocabulary, tracing its poetic coordinates, delineating the literary horizon within which the narrative unfolds. The private sphere thus blends into the existential dimension, into the relationship between self and world, defining individual psychological traits as symbolic structures in the process of interpreting reality. The artist reads her soul out loud, to an audience that gradually draws closer and secretly recognizes that they share the same fears, the same anxieties, the same needs.

It is necessary to repair to a shelter from the world and at the same time, to repair the world, to build refuges, to construct havens, to weave coverings, but above all, to create a performative liturgy that can restore, and thus consign to memory, the flow of life energy, the incessant movement, the unstoppable current of a relentless fluctuation between self and world. And so, just as a caterpillar uses a cocoon for its transformation into a butterfly, Sissi wraps herself up in her works, she inhabits them, her breath moves them, her warmth molds them, her movement transforms them until the work demands its own role, expels the artist from its body and seals it off in solitude. The work that feeds on the artist’s presence becomes a torturer, it welcomes her into its entrails and then gets rid of her, it shows hospitality then reveals itself to be implacable; it is work that is not afraid to show its own flesh, its own twisted intestines. From her first pieces with scubidou strands to her rattan nests, from her iron cages to her knotted ropes, from her terracotta bones to her bizarre minglings of garment fabrics, all her work suggests the presence of a repeated act of writing, an insistent embroidery, an inexpressible weaving, a tangle of signs, gestures, and materials that wrap around the artist’s personal experience and capture its secret obsession.

It is an intimate, silent, discreet, solitary obsession, like Richard Long’s endless walks or Marisa Merz’s copper weavings: pebbles gathered on mountains and arranged in museums; copper wire that is knotted and stretched out to compose geometric patterns, to weave paintings, to create intangible dancing slippers. Sissi seems to have a surprising familiarity with Maria Merz’s work in particular, not so much on the level of form and composition as of poetics and language; the narrative results that emerge are distant, extraneous to the conceptual outlets, and yet one glimpses startling grammatical similarities, unexpected emotional parallels. The line in Marisa Merz’s drawings, which twists and tangles around itself on the paper until it cuts right through, or the tangle of copper wire, reverberates in a similarly obsessive way in the scubidou knots, in the rattan, in the snarls of rope that make up the bodies of Sissi’s work. It is the intimacy of a sign that is mixed and blurred, knotted and torn, that lays itself out to welcome the artist, to become a home and garment. The garments that Sissi designs, sews, composes and then wears are both works and performances: they are sculptural works that belong to a complex process, constantly propelled by a fluctuation between the obsession of the web and the symbolism of the form, the intimacy of a secretly autobiographical language and the display of an invasive, cumbersome material body. At the same time, the garment pieces are the theatrical, performative action of a mise-en-scéne in which the artist is called on to stage her own secrets, to don her own nakedness. This also takes place, perhaps in even more clearly, in the “Dinners”, where this liturgical theatricality asserts itself at a decked table and takes the form of a communion among diners. Perhaps one could sense a faint echo of Daniel Spoerri’s “tables”, as well as a probable reference to the communal performative atmospheres of Rirkrit Tiravanija; definitely, an affectionate, childish memory of the exuberant exaggeration in Claes Oldenburg’s food pieces. In Sissi’s slightly Tuna; (capricious, visionary and self-referential instinctiveness, there is a ceaseless flow of impressions and memories from the news and from art history, a series of visual clicks and interpretative leaps that make this work surprising and often disconcerting, as an artistic practice that slips between the gaps of erniticism; that recoils from preestablished categories, that welcomes in strange bedfellows. Tables decked out in the most unexpected ways, in the most peculiar places, with the most tempting foods with leave snails embroidering their own decorations, with an attentive audience ready to carry out its own rite: the liturgy takes place through the act of consuming the work. Once again, the performative act redeems the formal elegance of the setting, which, in some cases, is tragically romantic, giving the work a destructive, painful twist, or an unexpectedly joyful one. It is Sissi’s baroque feast: part fancy dress and hallucinatory Vision, part obsession and autistic insistence. And thus we return to the garments, a quintessential game of dress-up, an absurd magic based on combinations and interweaving, chromatic epiphanies in which the fabrics chase after their own pattern, a different destiny, a faded memory. The narrative of garments sets into motion the childish capacity for vision, fuels the playful fantasy that sets free forms and images, colors and materials. Once again, we find the obsession with weaving, embroidery, sewing, drawing, because for Sissi, clothes are big drawings, they are sheets to inhabit and experience, territories to explore, places in which to hide, and in which to test the infinite masks |

behind which we carry out the adventure of living.

And so the work takes shape after it is worn, appearing as the shell of a memory, of a vanished presence, of a completed action, of a gesture performed; the garment is an empty skin, the imprint of an absence that can be sensed. Drawing and gesture are the boundaries within which one glimpses the sense of confusion in Sissi’s artwork: the intentionally insistent, repeated line that fills up diary pages day after day, then manifests itself in weaving and knotting, embroidery and modelling; the autobiographical act that leads the world back to itself, that demonstrates the artist’s presence, in all its power and weakness, through every part of her daily life. Sissi’s art is lateral, crooked, oblique, difficult to pigeonhole, surreal, if that term were not too full of ambiguities; an art inclined to dance steps and pirouettes, capable of exasperating the gaze and deeply etching itself into the mind.