NATALIA ŚLIWOWSKA

aka Natasha Chaosu

“THE TRUE IS THE MOMENT OF THE FALSE”

Natalia Śliwowska (1994) is a Polish filmmaker and photographer who graduated in cultural studies at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Here she specialized in film studies and art analysis and criticism, researching artistic strategies derived from critical theory. Her photographs were featured in magazines such as Film Shooters Collective, LensCulture and Uncertain Mag. During her studies, she directed an independent documentary and co-founded and curated a cinema club ‘Kino Suka’, a place where transgressive cinema and social discourse got connected. She began her master's at the Netherlands Film Academy with research on adapting a theory of Pure Form to film. Research that led to her current interest in performative documentaries. Her works explore questions of representation and inability to know. Exploring these questions in the context of the traumatic past of her family, she is currently working on her first feature documentary Insurance Against Meteorites in collaboration with Jorik Amit Galama.

www.sliwowska.com nataliasliwowskathings@gmail.com

Authenticity Guy Debord has famously stated, “The true is the moment of the false”, and there’s something in that quote that I keep wondering about. When he speaks of the society of spectacle, I associate it with the immeasurable amount of socially defined frames that we lay over our social interactions. As a result, art comes closer to advertising in the age of ‘mechanical reproduction’ of images, which are carriers of the market values. This grand diagnosis has only a little to do with my practice, but it helped to set me on my path. What I’m looking for in filmmaking are those moments where performance gets the better out of the performer. Let’s call them the “moments of truth” for the time being, these instances where people concoct their bullshit (even subconsciously) and it pushes them to perform. At that moment, there’s a slight opening for me to catch something - you might call it a true self - but I’d rather say it’s just another layer of the self that stayed hidden. What I find cocky in Debord’s statement is that you might assume there’s one ultimate truth to discover. I don’t believe that. When I speak of authenticity, what I have in mind is not some kind of true essence, but these parts of human behaviour that we are most likely to hide - from others, the camera, but most importantly - ourselves. It doesn’t have to be something bad or evil that we conceal on purpose. It’s just those things that come out when you drop your guard, lower your defences. I think I managed to capture a few of those moments that contain authenticity understood as the moment where people get disarmed, where something that even they were not conscious of came to the fore through their attempts at performance.

Performance The way we commonly apply the notion of performance in our everyday conversations is mostly negative. The performer is the one who is insincere. It comes from the fact that a good performance is indiscernible from reality, and it puts the perceiving subject in an uncomfortable position. When you suspect someone might be performing, you feel anxious as you can’t tell if you can trust it. Now, what is a source of discomfort in regular interactions can become an asset on camera, as the camera works like an accelerator. Whatever your subject is trying to do, it can single out, and render visible in the moment of its concoction. It doesn’t happen all that often, but you can cast your camera like a fishnet to raise your chances of retrieving those fleeting glimpses of performance. In that respect, I believe it to be related to what investigative journalists are looking for - the cracks and openings that will let them uncover the story that others want to (consciously or not) conceal. What is incredibly revealing in that process is often the moment where people involved are confronted with the footage of themselves. Very often, it is only after they became the spectators of their own performance when people realize they were steering away from something that had been buried deep inside them. Those moments, captured on camera, accelerate their process of self-recognition by offering them externalized evidence. Those rare flashes are the instances of authenticity that I’m after when encouraging a performance.

Intervention Spotting a bad performance in a fiction film, one that shines through and points to the fact that someone is acting, is a source of annoyance. It’s considered bad acting and bad

WALKING ON EGGSHELLS: a photographic novel / a research publication In this book Viola Zelazny and I invite the reader to come along and experience a journey of consequences which sprouted from one innocent film exercise in directing non-actors. For that, I invited a stranger to my apartment. In turn, I was left with disturbing confessions pointing towards a criminal offense related to the most extreme of social taboos. Written in 3 different voices this book externalises my process of denial, the inability to believe it, confusion as to where the fantasy and reality split. Consisting of the screenshots of mini DV footage, phone photographs, transcripts of interviews, dialogues and research presentations; monologues of an obsessed mind in search of synchronicities and diary accounts this book blurs the lines between reality and performativity.

PILGRIMAGE: two channel video installation When I was a kid, each year there was this one morning when I would wake up to sounds of collective prayers rendered by a small megaphone. Each year a Catholic procession walking from Wrocław to Trzebnica would pass in front of my bedroom window. On the one hand, a reminder of a passing time, on the other, one of my first alienating reminders of Poland's strong cultural polarization. In Pilgrimage I set up a white backdrop on which I capture that very same procession. With one video presenting an establishing shot and the other a close up of passing pilgrims, I want to immortalise it and offer my childhood contemplation to the audience.

directing. In my practice, rendering the layer of performance visible is the key. Or to be even more precise, it is not about staging a bad, self-denouncing performance, but having the spectator witness the change of registers while the performance unravels on screen. I achieve that through a series of interventions - changing the tone, and making you question the status of what you’re watching. Instead of giving you comfort of recognition, a certainty that you’re either watching a documentary or a fiction film, I intervene and make you aware of my interventions. A majority of the material in Insurance Against the Meteorites (co-directed with Jorik Amit Galama), which is a very intimate story touching upon a real family trauma, feels like hands-on documentary footage, but we consciously inject it with those heavily staged scenes that frame my real-life protagonists as performers of their own stories. Those interventions bring different sets of behaviours and emotions to the fore - ones that are not necessarily more “real” but they certainly reveal something that our everyday composure might have repressed. However, those scenes can only work, if they are “sandwiched” inside the honest state-of-the-art documentary footage that establishes the layer of “reality”, and therefore a frame of comparison. Through interventions, both layers - the one that we consider “real” and the “performative” - denounce themselves as constructs, conventional frames of representation. None of them is more true but assembled together they allow us to glimpse into the elements that they were respectively trying to conceal.

Transformation That recognition, of something buried deep suddenly emerging, is not only reserved for the spectators. Protagonists themselves also realize that the performance unlocks something in them. I mix the observational approach with performative rehearsals where we work on staging what my protagonists have already shared with me. On one hand, from a purely dramaturgical perspective, it lets me condense their story, squeeze out its essence and add a narrative flair. On the other hand, a confrontation with their own narrative, combined with the question of how to “act” it, often proves to be a transformative experience to the ones acting. To make you become a spectator of your own performance I set up collective screenings of the footage, where protagonists and all people involved watch the rushes. It is that perspective that allows you to start questioning certain elements of your own narrative that you got accustomed to. In Insurance Against the Meteorites we asked my mother to prepare a PowerPoint and give a presentation summarizing her investigation into my brother’s death. Working on the subject for over a decade, she internalized certain assumptions, so deeply, that only seeing herself recounting the events, she was able to start questioning her own narrative.

Transgression This brings us to another meaning of performativity formulated by the philosopher of language John L. Austin, who explained it as “the capacity of speech and communication to act”, meaning that when you say “I do” during your wedding ceremony, it not only causes ripples in the air but also transforms the reality. This is precisely how I understand the words of Dimira at the end of our journey described in the photographic novel Walking on eggshells (co-written with Viola Zelazny). When I insist on Dimira giving me some kind of summary, an explanation, she says: “I gave you a performance. I thought it was enough”. And she’s right, at this stage it no longer matters what was initially true or false, this performance created a whole new set of circumstances that transgressed their initial conditions. It created a new “reality”. (The book will be on show during MACA Artistic Research Week, Oct. 2021)

Director I actively assume the position of a director and do not try to conceal my presence. I would go even further and say that I perform the role of a director myself. Additionally, that directorial persona changes, and adjusts to what the material requires. In the shoot described in Walking on eggshells, I deliberately acted as this dreamy new-agey healer, who is not only holding the camera but actually performing a ritual. It was necessary to impose that frame, to disarm tension and justify the situation to one of the two participants, a stranger who walked into the situation unprepared. On the other hand, Insurance Against the Meteorites is potentially a minefield. What we uncover might have real consequences to the people involved - both emotional and legal. Thus, we needed to wrap the whole investigation in the unthreatening cloak of absurdity. We consciously assume those highly exaggerated docile roles of a slightly infantile, young Polish girl with ponytails, and a clueless outsider, a good-spirited and colourful Dutch artist. Playing with those assumptions, we subvert gender and cultural stereotypes using them to our advantage, catching people off guard. What we want people to see is a concerned sister who needs to understand what happened to her family when she was just a kid, in order to move on. It doesn't mean that the part of my personality that I channel here is made up, but rather that I accentuate one relatively non-threatening aspect of what I’m about and what I'm after. There is a scene in that film where I prepare to confront an ex-policeman who initially helped my mom with the investigation but currently denies any involvement. We sit in the car together with Jorik and we pump each other up - “You need to be non-threatening”, “You need to be cute”, “You need to make him feel guilty but also responsible”, “You need to be relentless, but sweet”. I need this pep talk to be able to withstand the pressure of that situation, to remember my lines and what I came there to learn.

Heuristics Looking at the way in which I set up my experiments, I started seeing a pattern that this concept describes really well. Instead of focusing on systematic analysis, heuristic relies on quick associations and intuitive shortcuts. It is a

problem-solving method, applied where there’s no time or means to study the whole issue in its towering complexity. The answers it produces are not necessarily conclusive and optimal but sufficient for finding a satisfactory solution. Understood as such, heuristic is the mode of reasoning that describes well what I do and how I search for answers - following the urges of my film-based practice (as in my ongoing research on the Funeral Culture). Most of the notions contained in this publication - including the performativity - were not something I set out to investigate. Instead, it was within the conditions that I kept setting for my experiments, that I saw performance emerging again and again as a tactic, a problem-solving method. The heuristic approach, coupled with some following reflection supplemented by grounded-theory research, let me constantly refine and question my understanding of my methods by abandoning a rigid frame of experiment in favour of what the situation dictates and requires. It is in the way I react to actual challenges, where my method lies. Thus, if I truly want to perform practice-based research on my methods, I can’t speculate on what I would do in optimal conditions, but reflect on how I actually respond to particular situations that unravel in front of me (for a more detailed case study of this approach, read my publication Walking on eggshells).

Interview Each medium favours a different set of cognitive activities. A written text requires a very different form of engagement than a moving image. If you emphasise the spoken word in the film, the cognitive condition that you create for the viewer is closer to reading a text than watching a video. I consider that a wasted opportunity as there are so many more cognitive activities that the film can trigger. I do not seek to get rid of the talking heads, but I try to decenter the words themselves as the sole point of focus in my works. I wouldn’t use such grand concepts as active spectatorship, but I certainly want to enable a more interpretative mode of watching, by providing you with enough information to start questioning what is being said. I want you to look for the hints in the unspoken, and form your own interpretations.

Staging My approach to staging stems from deadpan photography. Before I ventured into film, I was shooting stills and got fascinated by the dry, sharp wide shots of deadpan photographers who seemed to have been simply centering the cameras on their subjects and snapping their entirety. I offer you the whole person and its milieu for contemplation, making you partially responsible for the way you choose to see that person.

Based on an interview conducted and edited by Stanisław Liguziński

FUNERAL CULTURE: an ongoing research in an early phase Following 2 years of research for Insurance Against Meteorites, I developed a sudden, strong and unsettling fear of death. For self-shock therapy, I went to Poland, where, unlike in the Netherlands, death is present on the streets. It mostly manifests itself in the form of coffin and urn advertisements. Gathering meditative footage of the commercialization of Polish funeral culture, I end up researching various working conditions (and alienation levels) of people employed in the business, spanning from gravediggers to CEOs of cemetery GPS navigation softwares.