Mara Mattuschka

Autobiographical notes about bringing up children. A birth, the bite in the umbilical cord, a baby between sheets of music. Mimi fiddles educationally on a violin without strings, offers her breast and enjoys the little king with an improvised hysterical performance, and suddenly starts with Dadaistic oracles, letting the blead dance and carrying the child out into big wide world.

And our old Emperor said: "Thank you, it’s been very nice, it was a pleasure!" (M. M.)

In Parasympathica the artist divides her body into two halves, one black and the other white, with everything held together by a crown she wears. This "split" figure rotates jerkily by means of single frame animation. As Mattuschka spins on her own axis in a movement resembling a butterfly, the contrasts between the two divisions of the autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic, are blurred.

The birth of the alphabet.

In NavelFable Mara Mattuschka subjects herself to a second birth through endless pairs of tights. Her body struggles so hard and in such a deformed manner from out of the layers of nylon that the sheer struggle for survival becomes visible.

Mimi Minus, the star, advertises a new, sticky, black, brain-cleaning agent. She uses it first on her reflection in a mirror in order to clean one half of her brain and subsequently applies it to her whole body...

Mimi Minus on the escalator of horror. Mara Mattuschka´s alter ego once again sets off on a tour de force of physical renunciation. First she goes into a tumble when the ground is pulled out from under her feet. Caught in a weightless space, she undergoes a strange metamorphosis. Mimi´s body is subjected to unnatural forces and gradually deforms, her skin ruptures and - as if the human shell were only an intermediate stage in the process of evolution - is shed like a cocoon; a reptilian monster emerges.

Hands vigorously pull scraps of paper from an antiquated printing press, while their owner remains invisible. Then Mimi Minus and a razor blade - the incident is still shocking. The shrouded head, wrapped in muslin, reappears, and black paint is daubed over the top ... no image retains its integrity, for each is crossed through, painted, double-exposed, spilt, soiled.

Titania, a clumsy adolescent, sits in the tub, on the top of the plug-hole, the entrance to a murky world full of filth, bugs and hazards, which connects her to all the ass-holes in the world. Elements of this world now hover like Ghosts on the surrounding tiles, while Mimi Minus ruminates on the impossibility of love.

The world as a plaything for a giantess from outer space. A Godzilla-imitation on the way to herself: the giantess from outer space in the streets of a big city, fooling around, producing destruction, copulating with the Eiffel Tower. An orchestra of big feelings, the melodrama, defamed in infantile sounds and absurd costume, in make-up-persiflage and grotesque body-art-performances.

Mimi Minus spreads out a paper with a chequered pattern and drinks repeatedly from a bottle containing and dark liquid which is never emptied. The chequered paper is successively covered in chaotic painting until, finally, it is rolled out of the way. Underneath is a fresh chequered paper. With very intensive cutting, the film is composed of infinitely varied primary contradictions - black versus white, circle versus square, order versus chaos.

A despotic youth spends his vacation oppressing the peaceful inhabitants of an island with his evil fantasies.

On the 28th of October 1884 Daniel Paul Schreber, candidate of the National Liberal Party in Chemnitz, suffered a heavy defeat at the elections of the German Reichstag. He was taken up in the mental clinic of the Leipzig University soon afterwards. To his rehabilition he wrote an extensive piece of work, "Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken" (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), which was published in 1903 and led to his temporary dismissal. Hereby Schreber became the most quoted psychiatric patient in scientific literature. The third part was realized by Peter Tscherkassy based on a concept by Ernst Schmidt Jr.

A short film by the German experimental filmmaker Michael Brynntrup from 1993. The film describes a surrealistic and absurd cycle of activities in a hermetically sealed cemetery from which the actors cannot break out.

Two women scientists investigate the various stages of evolutionary development. Drawn by the scientific linguistic system, they become enmeshed in the anal circuit.

Manuela, the mermaid, is annoyed: The only thing her counterparts in the self-awareness group are interested in is the question, "Where is your clitoris?".