Again in her latest work, the artist Veronika Eberhart translates theoretical reflections on socio-political changes, feminist issues and economic constraints into a complex arrangement composed of performance, video, sound and installation. At the heart of her presentation is a 22-minute film entitled 9 is 1 and 10 is none, in which she picks up on ideas from the Italian-American philosopher Silvia Federici’s pioneering book Caliban and the Witch.
Using the figure of the witch, Federici traces the disciplining and “domestication” of women over the centuries, placing this process within the context of capitalist socialisation. Rather than seeing the persecution of witches as a relic of the feudal world, she understands it as an organised form of subjugation of the body aimed at increasing production and controlling reproduction (of the workforce), and hence a structural mechanism in the development and implementation of capitalism. For Federici, however, it was also essentially women who protested against the enclosure of common land, the disciplining of the body and the functionalisation of sexuality. In this way, the figure of the witch becomes a symbol of resistance against the spread of capitalism and its forms of exploitation.
Against this background, Veronika Eberhart has examined art-historical depictions of witches and their propaganda content. She has transferred a drawing by Hans Baldung Grien into an abstract spatial sculpture whose colours also correspond with the central elements of the film. Here an abandoned wood workshop serves as a setting for the performative appropriation of former integral working processes as well as the re-staging of depictions of witches from various centuries. Balanced between gestures drawn from working processes, art-historical poses, and a dancing measurement of space, her choreography of movements transcends time and place and accentuates the question of continuities in the merging of the body, sexuality and capitalism.
