Q & A with
Laura Eftychia Papachristos & Margaux Compte-Mergier
10.11.2025
1. The Beginning
What first moved you to begin working on Stillleben? Was there a particular moment, experience, or intuition that initiated the project?
Working with still life is a way to talk about the human condition indirectly, en creux – as you would say in French, on that which is present in the negative. Stillleben in French is nature morte, so it’s very on the nose, a bit too much so maybe, it forces you to look at something to the end. Beauty becomes a function of a temporal relation (thank you for showing us this passage of the ethics of psychoanalysis, Sophia). During the Corona-lockdown Margaux started creating these “ghosts of objects” by putting many layers of latex on an object (like a cup), letting them dry and taking them of – they hold the shape.
2. Title and Tradition
Stillleben evokes both stillness and the long tradition of still life in European art. What does the term mean for you in the specific context of performance and perhaps our current moment?
As a young girl Laura was gifted the name Stillleben, when she first saw the painting by George Flegel - Stilleben mit einem Hirschkäfer, so still life with stag beetle. In front of a plate with a fish, bread and wine there is a stag beetle, seemingly on it’s way to explore the dead fish. This has led to a profound irritation on what makes the still life still and what makes it life - as the beetle seemed to travel in between. What irritates unbewegtes Dasein is movement then. Joining these opposition between the nature morte and the Stillleben has been the driving force of this collaboration.
3. Breath, Body, and the Atemwende
Breathing appears central to your work, as both material and rhythm. Paul Celan speaks of the Atemwende — the “turn of breath” that carries the poem towards something new. Breath seems important for your work on Stilleben as well. Does performance have its own kind of “breath-turn"?
Breath is the negative of Poetry, or the other way around. It is material and rhythm, because of our bodily existence, it has to be so. In performance this becomes even more obvious. The installation is a room, is a dress, without Laura as a perfomer it is a still life. Breath is literally what makes it become alive, what rebels against the still, what invokes the existence of the body, which always is the vulnerable object of any performance and relates to the spectators as bodies too. The perfomer’s breath is resonating through the audience’s body before filling up the space – we think it is possible to call this an Atemwende as the breath does carry the performance towards something new.
4. We are also very interested to learn more about how the relationship between stylistic/literary devices and the perception of visual art seems to be a continuous theme throughout your work - as, for instance, in your reading of Charlotte Delbo, a Holocaust survivor.
Well, for many years I regarded myself as a “visual analphabet” – someone who forgot to look around me, because my mind was always like stuffed with and wrapped in words. Like living in a verbal fog. But occasionally some paintings kind of penetrated the fog and provoked very strong emotional reactions in me. And I encountered the writings of Georges Didi-Huberman and was blown away by the way he could change my view. I wanted to learn to see – sehen lernen, as Rilke has it. This made me write two books on painters – one on the Danish artist Anna Ancher, and one on Caspar David Friedrich. I realized that ekphrasis – putting images into words – is actually a basic literary operation. One simplified version of a (certain kind of) writer would be that she is someone who puts images (whether inner or outer, fantasized or witnessed) into words. Then again, when it comes to visual art as well as to literature, I will always be interested in the messages that reside in that which exceeds representation – the materiality of the signifier, if you will: the patterns of sounds and letters in literature, the texture and brush strokes in painting. My basic definition of art is that it is a kind of thinking that occurs in the giving form to a material, be it the material of verbal language, canvas and paint, or something else.
5. In the chapter “Creative Paranoia” you observe how Tove Ditlevsen turns the protagonist himself into a stylistic device: “It is a bit as if TD, with the paranoid person as medium, paints expressionistic paintings.” Tove Ditlevsen herself too. Can you say a bit more about how the relationship between aesthetics and psychic illness? If "tout le monde est fous" (as Lacan says), there are clearly some that are more fous than others.
TDs paranoid character experiences his thoughts as material, as some kind of fluid whirl inside of him. This may of cause be a horrible, anxious experience, but also close to art’s materialization of mind matter.
I tend to regard art as basically de-familiarizing; it disturbs our habitual way of perceiving – the “grid” through which we perceive the world. There are many ways to put this: It is closer to the primary processes, it lets in a bit of the real, it destabilizes the symbolic order. It opens to Dionysian dissolution, but counters it with creating new form, or, as Melanie Klein would have it: the artist has to be able to dwell in the paranoid-schizoid position to make way for that act of “reparation” which the work also is. Then, there is also a “maniac” dimension of artistic creation, this observation was Anton Ehrenzweig’s supplement to the Kleinian theory of art.
I guess that in some cases, making art is what prevents the artist from suffering from her madness. It may also not do so. Or the artist may suffer as a response to unproductiveness. This was the case for Tove Ditlevsen who fell into suicidal depressions when she could not write. In a posthumously edited poem, she speaks of her analyst, “this well-meaning person” as someone who never understood “the cruel pain of infertility”, which I take to be her pain when no poems came to her. As a child, she had the epiphanic experience of luminous garlands of words coming to her as she sat in the window facing the backyard. In this image, she is really in the position of a saint, in the feminine position – the pas-tout, if you will. When this experience is blocked to her, she falls into despair and abuse. “When no one wrote, all the pages were empty” she writes in an early poem, apostrophizing herself as doomed.
“Tout le monde est fou”… Even in this “tout” there might be the potential of a “pas-tout”, and perhaps that is the share of the artist. A kind of madness which is not devoted to the big Other, but rather to the flaw in the big Other.
6. How does this engagement with paranoia in Tove Ditlevsen relate to your interest in the child's perspective in your previous work and to the question of the value of psychoanalysis and aesthetics today?
My PhD dissertation on the child’s perspective in modernist literature (which I wrote 30 years ago) was much inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900. To him, the child is someone to whom the world (the symbolic order) is at the same time completely familiar and completely unfamiliar. On one hand, the world is the child’s natural, unquestionable dwelling; on the other hand it is a place filled with enigmatic messages that it does not get or misunderstands. Benjamin sees a great philosophical potential in the child’s misunderstanding, both for dismantling oppressive signifiers and for creating new ones.
A common denominator in all this may be my interest and belief in the defamiliarizing perspective that I find in both art and psychoanalysis. Furthermore, Benjamin as well as psychoanalysis as well as Tove Ditlevsen insist that we have an obligation towards the expectations that our past had to the future.
7. Looking Ahead
Stillleben works with stillness — but does the project have a “next movement”? Your work seems equally interested in what happens after "still life" - Are there gestures or directions you feel drawn toward in your future work?
This was our 4th collaboration and we feel they always speak to each other. There have been movements before and there will be many afterwards.
Margaux Compte-Mergier is a French artist based in Berlin. Her sculptural practice explores the unstable threshold between past and future, nature and culture. Working with stone powder, silicone, resin, and latex, she creates hybrid forms — fragmented bodies, animal and vegetal figures, and objects — that oscillate between relics and anticipations. Her work reflects on myth, metamorphosis, and the human drive to challenge and exceed its own condition. She studied literature, philosophy, and aesthetics in Paris before completing a Master’s degree at EHESS- Paris. Represented in Spain by RÍO & MEÑAKA gallery, she has undertaken residencies including 104-Paris and presented solo exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon.
Laura Eftychia Papachristos is a performance artist and teacher in Berlin with an interest in psychoanalysis. She is intrigued by the relation of inside and outside as one can get from one to the other without crossing the edge. In her work she explores this irritating correlation. She has studied anthropology with a focus on technology and sexuality in Berlin and Athens.
The two artists meet in the desire to transcend the art experience by animating the inanimate. Papachristos inhabits the sculptures of Compte-Mergier, creating a dialogue—two times, two expressions of experience, a breath at the heart of fossils. They have been working together since 2021.