Dear opera and art lovers!
Pipilotti Rist is a pioneer in the use of digital imagery and sound – and from the very beginning, she has also incorporated space, atmosphere, and sensually heightened communication with the audience. Above all, she managed to infuse the once coldly regarded medium of video with a kind of warmth-inducing effect. Rist’s artistic practice has much in common with opera. Few in her generation have succeeded in transferring the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk into the digital age as she has. Like opera, her art has broad impact and a frame-breaking force.
This artist understands the laws of transmitting images and sounds onto bodies… And now, as you sit comfortably in your seats, we have all just experienced the psychedelic joyride of a schematic yet utterly realistic abdominal cavity. You have to admit that you immediately start to spread your wings in front of this curtain – almost as if you were already hearing the Alpine Symphony...!
Yet Pipilotti Rist introduces a paradox into the space in a friction between freedom and constraint. For lying in a computer tomograph evokes above all the claustrophobic feeling of being confined, bound, immobilized! However, Rist’s gaze into the innermost parts of our bodies is liberated from this and suggests something that no computer tomograph has ever achieved: that here, we might just encounter the hidden seat of our soul.
An immense vastness opens up… And yet, there is an unmistakable obstacle in the space. The largest part of the image is occupied by it. We are, in fact, sitting right in front of the massive, restrained waters of a reservoir. We can sense the potential of bursting, the overpressure and the danger of giving way. The colour shifts in the landscape: do they correspond to this overpressure, perhaps in our brain? In our perception apparatus?
The only thing that helps is complete surrender to the element that carries us, be it water or air, which brings to mind swimming like a fish or flying like a bird, or perhaps like an astronaut through space.
Then flying over the dam is no problem! And behold, the much-evoked oceanic feeling overwhelms us: Just like experiencing music? Feeling weightless – isn’t that why we come here? Of course, the dam is symbolic and stands for the mechanism of a psyche that blocks, that resists the surrender to the flow and the act of letting go.
Sigmund Freud also dealt with these "oceanic feelings". He defined it as "the feeling of an indissoluble bond between oneself and the outside world." Freud himself lived in a paradoxical situation with this. He knew of these oceanic feelings – even if perhaps only from hearsay – because he described them so well, yet he resisted surrendering to them. Freud once admitted, “A rationalistic, or perhaps analytical disposition in me opposes being emotionally moved and not knowing why I am or what is moving me.”
Freud, who also claimed to be entirely unmusical, was nonetheless the great doctor of the soul! With how much empathy, musicality, and visual understanding did he listen to and look into souls. The soul – the ANIMA, the much-sung anima mia – especially here at the opera, it has been summoned so often in the highest and lowest tones! The soul and the opera – a close symbiosis, indeed, the opera seeks to move us.
Now, Pipilotti Rist tells us, through her invocation and in friction with the image of the most advanced technology, just how much this ever-circling soul slumbers at the core of our bodies. Made visible through the pull of a technologically invoked vacuum. With Pipilotti Rist, we say once again: Curtain up, and stage free for the soul of opera!
This speech was given in German by Bice Curiger at the opening of the artwork on 24 September 2024 at the Vienna State Opera.