Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Ziarno, 1980
Teresa Tyszkiewicz
Ziarno

Teresa Tyszkiewicz (*1953 †2020 Poland, France) studied at the Faculty of Mechanics and Technology of Warsaw Technical University (1974-1978, graduated 1978). She was a co-founder of the Association of Filmmakers “Repair” (1980). Since 1982 she has been living in Paris with her husband Zdzislaw Sosnowski (a fellow artist), and the two have realised several films together. As an author of short films, she dealt with photography, drawing, performance, painting, creating spatial objects and sculpture. Her works are in numerous public and private collections, including the Musée Ville de Paris and the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain and Fondation Camille in Paris.

This film structurally combines the conflicting mechanisms limiting the possibilities of the biological and social development of human beings. It is the image of the feeling defined by the structure of the author’s experiences. “The most significant role in creating the erotic character of Ziarno (The Grain) – besides the somehow culminating feather bath scene, with its phallic-like symbolism referring, in my opinion, primarily to the act of fetishising that Teresa is playing out on herself, besides the out-of-shot sound of breathing – was given to the aspect of touch. As Merleau-Ponty posits in his essay “The Intertwining – The Chiasm”, touch is the only sense for which no single organ is responsible; he also points out that touching is equal to being touched. Through the act of touching, the film’s reception seems to be transferred from the image of the body to the act of experiencing it – for the artist, and, for the viewer – from the voyeuristic act of looking at the body to the more self-referential act of experiencing how the artist depicts the act of experiencing her body. At the same time, the frontier of the filmed body as well as the frontier body of the image seem to have been shaken.” (Ewa M. Tatar)


Courtesy Teresa Tyszkiewicz

Document media
16 mm

Issue date
1980

Tags
touch, voyeurism