Teresa's Body

The knees, the back, the elbows, the neck: Teresa’s body appears repeatedly and almost programmatically as a fragment in Magdalena Chmielewska’s portrait of her mother. Teresa is a woman divided into parts: while outwardly intact, her permanently exhausted body, preferring to wrap itself in camouflage clothing, bears deep wounds. “My spine is going to break at any moment,” she says, adding that her body is in this condition because her life hasn’t been good. While Teresa lies down on a wooden board in the hope of relief, her daughter Magda, through dance, attempts to reach the threshold at which somatic exhaustion tips over into trance. She euphorically reports on a workshop: “They teach us to work from the highest vitality of the body.”  

Magdalena Chmielewska approaches her mother, Teresa Chmielewska, through a non-linear autofiction centered on a body damaged by patriarchal violence. At the beginning, a rhythmic knocking accompanied by a quiet gurgling can be heard, as if recorded underwater or from an abdominal cavity. The enraptured memory images that break through from the depths of another layer of time are similarly free of constraints. Beneath a sour cherry tree, two sisters bury an amulet and recite an incantation. The so-called “little heaven,” their spiritual tool, is supposed to free their mother from her back pain and protect her from her father’s violence.  

Catatonia and choreographed movement, “bleeding” sour cherries and meat: In the tension-filled space, filled with symbolically charged motifs, fluid forces meet stasis, and signs connect with each other to form chains of association. The boundaries between present and past, reality and dream, “I” and “you” are blurred. Documentary and fiction likewise flow into one another, into a trauma fiction, with mother and her daughters in the roles of their alter egos.  

New losses are followed by movements of departure and escape: “My feet are burning. My body is burning!” (Ester Buss)  

Translation: John Wojtowicz