Daria jabenko biography of martin

She was sharing her life story, showing her beautiful work and sharing stories. What really touched me was when she said: when you have an idea, just get up and do it! She gave some of her examples of how she was working at the beginning of her career. She had a job from 9 to 6, then went home and was working on her own and freelance projects till 3am!!

Practically everyday! This really touched me; I could imagine how many beautiful things we could create if we only spent more of our time on bringing our ideas to life. After listening to her, I understood that when we get an idea, we need to rush and bring it to life. If you make a mistake, so what, you learn from it. I feel like these waves of inspiration and wisdom touched me so much, I need to rethink my ways of working.

Believe it or not, I never had a studio!! Dreams come true. You need to do work and bring them to life. I daria jabenko biography of martin this message inspires you to rethink the way you work, the way you look at your work and encourages you to make this extra step towards your goals and dreams. Friday, October 28, This season I absolutely love this time of year, it is so magic and special to my heart.

I love wearing warm sweaters and beautiful cashemere scarfs, wrap myself in a warm blanket and enjoy a freshly brewed chai latte in front of my fireplace. It feels so amazing, so heart warming. It feels like her majesty autumn is slowly becoming colder as is getting ready to embrace the winter season. Beautiful pumpkins are now everywhere making this time of year blossom.

I really like this quote by Albert Camus "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower". I'm so inspired by this sweet burning aroma of the woods coming from the fireplaces. Yes, she has her head firmly attached, face facing the right way with an incisive view of business — first hand experience let me tell you. This has enabled her to work for the biggest names in magazine and stores throughout the world.

It is all about knowing what you can do well, delivering quality resultsthen getting people to call you. The latter happens all the time to Dariaone things she is is in demand, not just as a talented individual, but as a truly lovely person. Scardi, Gabi. Una teoria delle forme pensierodomusweb. Seaberg, Maureen, Tasting the Universe, Synesthesia from the inside out psychologytoday.

Artist of the week Daria Martin Skye Sherwin guardian. Exhibitionist: What to see this week Laura Mclean-Ferris guardian. British Art does it Show? Moira Jeffery Glasgow Herald, 01 June Laura Mulvey: I just wanted to say what a very rich work, I think, Tonight the World is, how complex it is: its variety of media; its visual references brought together, framing its extraordinary central panel made up of the five segments of the dream films.

So these uncertainties of temporality escape the linear, and offer us multiple other ways of thinking about the figuration of time and the place of time in all our imaginative formations. So I want to start by asking Daria to tell us a bit about your grandmother, Susi, your relationship with her and how she came to be such an important source to your work.

I think you actually said that it was through Susi that you came to be an artist. Daria Martin: Thank you for that, Laura. Yes, my grandmother Susi was a great inspiration to me and also somebody who troubled me greatly in equal measure. She was an artist herself, a painter. She made expansive, spacious, color field paintings, and my time spent with her in her studio as a child set the foundations for my later desire to become an artist.

She was also somebody who ignited in me a curiosity about the life of the mind. She was a rather brilliant intellect, not unlike you, Laura. But she also had a rather dreamy, ethereal side. By the time I was born, she had been in Jungian analysis therapy for several years. And I was aware meantime that she was keeping this daily dream diary initially in support of her therapy.

This went on for half of her life for about forty years. It was a meticulous daily process of recording every dream: typed, organized. And when she died, this was left to [the family], and she had given us permission to look at it. So this vast archive of about 20, dreams was one starting point. LM: 20, dreams. But can I just take you back a little bit?

Because Susi went into her analysis when she was middle aged and was suffering from a certain depression, but there was also the legacy of her traumatic childhood. DM: Susi was somebody who had quite a lot of privilege in her life. She, after all, had the time to sit down and record her dreams every morning, go into analysis, paint, etc.

She grew up the child of Jewish industrialists in Brno, Czechoslovakia. When she was sixteen, the family had to evacuate, and moved initially to England and then to Brazil, and finally to California, daria jabenko biography of martin they settled. And this trauma of her forced migration was something that was put on ice for many years, and I believe, was reignited in her middle age, when she went through a crisis of severe depression.

DM: Yes, another disturbance. Yeah, the starting points for the [Barbican] exhibition were the diaries and the house in which my grandmother lived. The diaries encompass everything from her forties through her eighties, and recycle all sorts of references. But the five dreams in the exhibition specifically were dreams about her childhood home in in Brno, Czechoslovakia.

And we showed up at the House and we were greeted by a panel of well-wishers. And we three family members were already far outnumbered. And then this press corps arrived; a group of photographers and reporters with microphones and they snapped pictures, and asked us questions. And then we were invited out to the garden where we were asked to plant a tree and a banner popped up as if from nowhere.

More pictures were taken and then something rather strange happened: someone pulled out a folder, a photograph. And I recognized this old black and white portrait vaguely as an ancestor, right? LM: And so that moment of sudden alienation, from the ritual that you were undergoing, gave you a new desire in a sense, to repossess the story.

DM: Yes, exactly. As I digested all of the feelings stirred up by this visit, I wanted very much to get back behind the camera to make my own images and, in a sense, to reclaim the house for myself, to restore something, perhaps to repair something. And also this particular dream is going to be a kind of central focus for our conversation.

DM: Yes, exactly so. It begins with a discussion about the fussy and old-fashioned furniture in the house, and then it continues:. I poke a bigger hole and I see lots of eyes inside, like some small mammals, a nest of some kind perhaps. I call in that we are the Korean Army. The kids think that this is a mistake and that I should not give them too much information till I find out who they are.

I poke all the way through and see a stout, small man in grey pants and sleeveless undershirt, domestic looking, as though he were just going to another small room within the wall to where his family is. One of the main changes is in the pacing of the dream. The Korean Army is outside. First of all, the performances, the casting, who the characters are: could you talk to us a little bit about that?

DM: Well, the central challenge here was to lift these dreams off the page. To really embody the dreams and give them sculptural heft and space and life and sense was my challenge. So the first task was to cast the dreams, and I decided to allow Susi to be embodied by four actresses of four different generations who also play all the other parts, including the men.

DM: And the boys, yeah. And this started off as something of a practical consideration because we had to fly everyone out to Brno and a nice small cast of four was quite economical. But also, I think it hints at the sense that within our dreams we populate them with many figures who appear to be familiar to us, but who also might be parts of ourselves in a sense.

DM: But I also wondered whether that flexibility of gender and subjectivity had something to do with some of your own ideas about the instability of gender in spectators of film. Nowadays, I think the spectator is much more able to shift, change, kind of chameleon-like, from gender to gender, from position to position, different kinds of identification.

And certainly, in a film like yours, I see the oddness of the gender as something which is almost commenting on playing with that. Do you want to say something about the way in which gender and play with gender leads on to play with intergenerational identity? The different generations imply different times at which she was writing her diaries, perhaps, but I think they also imply generations, including her, my parent, and myself within a family.

LM: Yes, exactly. I was very interested in the way that you seem here to be referring to the genre of melodrama. You have the kind of comfortable bourgeois interior that you associate daria jabenko biography of martin the Hollywood domestic melodrama. But also, you have this sense —this is both in the original dream and in your film— a sense of the uncanniness of the domestic interior.

I have things I could say about this, but would you like to comment on it? Yes, certainly the house in this film is a crucible for fears and desires. The scene implies the suppressed longings and frustrations that a woman at home might feel and how that could be played out within the family. So it is a hothouse for repressed desire. DM: Yes, absolutely.

At the beginning of this clip you see the actress tinkering with a ceramic figurine, and my great-grandmother really had crammed this functionalist house with knick knacks and floral curtains and all of that. So what the repressed interior, the tense family relations, cannot express between themselves in melodrama tends to be displaced onto lighting or objects like Susi and the figurine, and then suddenly an explosion of the melodramatic excess.

You have [in Tonight the World ] the gramophone which epitomises the object of display, but also suddenly becomes an object of the uncanny and anxiety…. DM: Oh yeah, well, you said it beautifully. Yes, I think the salience of objects is something that has always interested me as a filmmaker —the way that people can become like objects and objects can become like people.

So a massive event in a dream might be played quite lightly, and might not be felt so strongly as it would in life, while some small detail might fill one with horror or joy. LM: And then of course, the space does become strange, uncanny, and so on. She slowly approaches. Finally, in the attic she finds a huge hole in the ceiling and all the birds fly out and attack her.

This kind of scene in which we move very slowly and hesitantly with the protagonist towards the object of both fear and fascination…. LM: Where, you see Melanie moving slowly forwards and then the camera then moves steadily forward with her…. LM: Then a reverse shot and so on. Gradually incorporating us, the spectator, into this very kind of anxiety-provoking but curiosity-driven—.

We are moving towards something that we both want to see but also dread seeing. So if you could just talk to us a little bit about the way that displacement and condensation are working here; it takes us across melodrama and into the dream and through to your staging of it. DM: Yes. In terms of displacement and condensation: my understanding again of displacement, as Freud describes it, is that in a dream, the true meaning or event or feeling would be displaced onto another object….

LM: …repressed, and so it has to find a way of displacing itself onto something that can come to the surface. Condensation meaning that there are multiple difficult feelings that all condense into one symbol, so that when one retrospectively unpicks the dream, there are multiple things that can come out of a single symbol. In fact, I chose the five dreams that we see in the exhibition precisely for the sense that there is at least a double, if not a multiple, layering of meaning to the main symbols.

And specifically, I chose dreams that had symbols that seemed to point towards the history of the Holocaust, on one hand, but also that pointed in a completely different direction. So, the man inside the wall could be a Jew hiding during the war, like Anne Frank did, inside walls, under floorboards and hidden in rooms. It could be that, but he could also simply be a worker going about his life as he seems to be in the dream.

My grandmother, in her diaryassociations, talks about her own grandparents being of this proletariat class, and how one only had to scratch the surface of the wallpaper to see back to that generation. LM: Yes, but the association with hiding during the Holocaust, was your association. One that you could easily link with her. DM: Absolutely. It implies this incredible build-up of fear, and then this wonderful, almost comic deflation of that fear.

Would you like to say something about the question of investigation, curiosity, narrative? So following on from melodrama you also have the whole genre of horror, where women may be trapped in a house and murdered. And we see short flashes of that history, and then they become longer and longer and build up through time until the two stories tie together and reveal a new meaning.

In this new genre the investigator is herself wounded and has her own horrific story to uncover. Or the film itself is investigating her own past. DM: Yeah. And the two come together. This is really just an aside, but whereas nowadays you do have Wonder Woman, you know, active female protagonists, heroines who become heroes, traditionally a female protagonist has been much more a detective.

Do we, how much? Five minutes, we can do it. Do you think about the gaze of the camera? Do you think about… do you think about my old theories and things like that? Absolutely, and —where to start? In Tonight the World those types of looking have integrated more. But one kind of shot that might be interesting to mention, is one that appears twice in this clip, and once elsewhere in the film, in which the protagonist enters her own point of view; it creates a rather uncanny effect.

The protagonist looks; cut to her point of view, possibly moving with her; and then, unexpectedly, she enters that shot. In a dream, the dreamer is the object of their own gaze in a sense, or a very shifting subjectivity. As we talked earlier about the unstable gender identities, unstable generational identities, the gaze itself also shifts around.

This might lead us on to the question of time and afterwardsness, which is about the relation—which I think is very important in this particular work— between the public and the private.

Daria jabenko biography of martin

Or rather, put the other way round, how the private becomes public. And in a sense, Susi has done one step of the work. You could talk also about there being two private archives- one being obviously these 20, dreams, hidden from view until they were cracked open after Susi died. The other being an informal or invisible archive, which is my own emotional experiences and memories, filed away over the years.

So perhaps it would be helpful to give a sort of anecdote as an example. A couple of months after this attack on the World Trade Center, his perceptions of the way that parents are dealing with their children completely changed. He says that from behind his hat and beard, he could see this radical difference in the behavior of the parents.

They would not let go over their children. They were clutching their hands with anxiety. So I received those kind of messages from Susi through my life, as well as receiving these great gifts of her creativity and artistic sensibility and interest in the interior life. You know, small messages that might be absences as well as disturbing stories.

A whole host of things, and these create a sort of invisible archive you might say. So, this project is about bringing both of these to life, in concert. And to the public. LM: And so that is, in in a sense, using Susi as your archival material, but then also the way in which she impacted on you, gives the emotional drive, as it were, to make the process a work of art.

DM: I think works of art can perform that process of repair even as they also dig in and create new ruptures. And one can see this this moment happening in two directions. Rather, timeframes coexist: we have the s, the s and all rolled into one in a sort of co-existence. I experience pain and sensation in response to seeing or thinking about another individual getting hit or touched on part of their body.

I get it in the same place on the opposite side if I am facing them, or on the same side if we are facing the same direction, and also get a shooting sensation up and down the middle of my torso when it happens. He taught me how to manage the pains by filling my head with other thoughts as quickly as possible when I saw someone else getting hurt, which happened a lot because little girls have a habit of playing with skipping ropes and chasing each other and nearly every day someone would fall or sprain their ankle.

A cognitive distraction could manage the pain, to the point where, if I looked away and thought of other things quickly enough, I could almost prevent myself from experiencing it at all. It did, however, make me feel like an awfully unsympathetic person whenever one of my friends fell over! Rather than being inward-turning, does mirror-touch enable social connection?

But your story implies a movement in the opposite direction: despite being highly empathic, funnily enough, you described feeling more callous than others when you had to look away from your hurt friends. Do you think that mirror-touch that might have evolved to increase protectiveness towards others could, because of its extremity and your need to protect yourself from vicarious pain, ironically cut down.

As an artist though not a synaestheteI am attracted to synaesthesia as a complicated model to open up approaches to learning, perceiving, and communicating — approaches which might be latent but suppressed by our culture. What could the experiences of mirror-touch synaesthetes contribute socially or artistically to a matrix attuned to other thresholds of sensitivity?

For example, a pen sitting on my desk pointing in my direction results in a very uncomfortable sensation of a pressure point. If a fork on the dinner table is pointed at me, I can feel the tines leaving a row of sharp pressure on my body where the fork is pointing. The feeling corresponds to the part of my body that the moving object is level with.

If it is something he has experienced before, then he will feel nearly the same thing. If he has not had that particular experience, then he will feel a milder form of a related experience. This goes for pain as well as other sensory perceptions. Before that time, he felt a light touch on the cheek — which was the usual kissing he got as a child.

He relates this to the fun he had as a child pretending to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or a Power Ranger, and happy sessions with his dad learning karate techniques, or the hours of fun playing with toy guns or swords — all of which almost never ended. One last thing: when he touches someone, he can feel their emotions, like most people feel hot and cold.

The sensations you describe him experiencing are strong ones whether pleasant or painful. Does he experience mirror-touch synaesthesia also for mild kinds of touch, like a soft caress or the touch of a distinctive fabric? For extreme temperature experiences? Or for taste, smell, for proprioceptive sensations i. I wonder, Syn List, whether people with other kinds of synaesthesia experience excess empathy as Akim does?

Myers-Briggs tests notwithstanding, a brilliant boss with terrible empathy is a terrible boss. Empathy is the ability to internalise what someone else is feeling as if you were feeling it. Psychopaths most definitely have no regard for the feelings of other people. There is surely a spectrum of pain experience and empathy as part of that, just as there is an unsurprising spectrum of every other part of human daria jabenko biography of martin.

On a personal note, I find it very difficult to detach from both the physical and emotional pain of others, even though there are clearly times when it would be ideal to do so. For example, I have always had big problems with seeing kids with loose teeth wobbling them around it is like I can strongly feel the remembered pain of my own experience, although I would not call it anything like mirror-touch synaesthesia in my own case.

Where it becomes problematic is with the kids. My daughter stepped on glass and made it back from the park about yards away with a shoe full of blood sloshing around and a deep gash on her foot. She put the shoe back on and managed to hobble daria jabenko biography of martin it had fallen off at just the wrong moment and she put her foot down on the glass.

Not every adult is good in a situation like this, but I had extra problems detaching enough to see the wound and clean it, in a situation where for a lot of practical and evolutionary biological reasons it would have been a lot better for my daughter if I could have detached, cleaned the cut and sorted it out with a minimum of emotion and physical malaise at the sight of the blood.

This is one reason I was never. I do not have mirror-touch syn, but emotion-colour and music-colour syn. I found it interesting you asked whether empathy was increased with all synaesthetes. I never really associated my empathy with my syn, but it is definitely higher than almost anybody I have known. I cannot watch certain movies, and have a very low tolerance to watching people inflict pain and suffering on others intentionally.

I cannot comprehend it, literally. It has nothing to do with squeamishness; I have worked in the medical field for almost 25 years, with almost 20 in level-one traumas, and do just fine. I do experience mirror-emotion. I got agitated when I saw a clip of the Virginia Tech shooter video released to the public. I felt his hate, and a certain pain at the world.

My most significant types of synaesthesia are emotion-colour and physical sensation-colour. I am possibly oversensitive to how people feel to me, but I have always thought that this was tied to having grown up in an abusive household and church … my safety and my ability to keep my little sisters safe was tied to knowing who was dangerous or when people were likely to hurt me or my siblings.

I have had experiences of physically sensing what I perceived others were physically sensing for instance, when watching the Chinese acrobats earlier this week, I got dizzy and queasy in response to the act where they roll around and spin inside the big rings. I also have had what I think. I never thought of either of these as having anything to do with synaesthesia.

I know of some other women who were abused as daria jabenko biographies of martin who also experience what I call physical memory and find it difficult to watch violence because it evokes such strong empathetic experiences. It does NOT occur when someone just passes out say, a mother fainting because she just got the news her son died.

Until reading this discussion, I was under the distinct impression everyone experienced this, but I get a very physical sinking feeling everywhere between my ribs and hips. Pretty much just the abdominal area; nothing else. If the sensation is evoked for a long period of time, it moves to the legs to where they cannot support a standing position.

In the U. In it, a child is sitting in the back seat of a car. The mother is smoking a cigarette, and the cigarette smoke permeates the car. The camera shows the child being buckled into the seat. The camera shows the windows being rolled up. The camera shows the doors being locked. The camera shows the cigarette smoke. As Alex writes, many people cringe or look away while watching onscreen violence I have always been very sensitive in this respect.

Do films also appeal to and impact on our senses of touch, temperature, taste and smell, in part, through mirror neurons? In response, Daria, to your musing about the visceral effects of media, I think that at times it can have the opposite effect. Some years ago when I was studying behaviour disorders and aggression, I remember reading a piece of research in which an audience was assembled ostensibly to hear a lecture.

The auditorium had televisions mounted high at both sides of. Researchers watched the audience from a hidden location above the stage. During the lecture, a man came up on the stage and engaged in an altercation with the speaker. When the man began to physically assault the speaker, the majority of the audience shifted from watching the lecturer to watching the altercation on the television sets, even.

They did not intervene to defend the lecturer. The whole thing was staged, of course, to test the theory that people are comfortable watching violence on TV — that is, they are able to distance themselves from violence. I see danger in assuming that for example a person with mirror-touch synaesthesia cannot. I also think conforming to gender roles has some influence on the behaviours that are thought to involve empathy.

I have a male family member who has, for as long as I have known, shown great distress when watching scenes of real bodily harm and surgical scenes in movies and TV. This same person has a history of neglecting to notice when people around him are seriously ill or injured, requiring medical attention. Noticing that someone has a great bleeding gash in their flesh does not require any type.

I do not know whether he has mirror-touch synaesthesia. I do not have it, but I do have many other forms of synaesthesia. Does knowledge of genuineness or fakery affect mirror-touch synaesthesia? For most of my life, I thought I could see only light, and only when the contrast is high. Here are a couple of my experiences. I was looking at a computer screen that was set to high contrast, and I was able to describe some shapes that were on the screen.

My mind supplied me with a picture that. It seems as though colours and different kinds of light have different textures. Some light feels plasticky, others feel heavy, others feel thin, or thick, or metallic. I tend to feel these colour textures on my cheek. Another time, I was at a movie theatre and, when I looked at the movie screen, a picture popped into my head of a bathtub draining, or something melting.

My mom told me that this is probably when the images on the screen are changing. As a child, Martin knew Adnan as a family friend. Etel Adnan : Film has a haunting power. It shows people and images as if they were in front of us, while they are in fact utterly absent. In your recent film, One of the Things that Makes Me Doubt, people, texts and artworks appear, disappear and return, links within a wider world.

Daria Martin : One of the reasons I work with film is its capacity to elide time and space. It can also create ruptures and dissonances. EA : Many generations appear in the film, including Anna Halprin, founder of postmodern dance. She surges onto the screen, her triangular face like an arrow, an element that ties things together and pushes them forward.

DM : Anna is a powerful force! And another woman artist, like you, making work inspired by Mount Tamalpais, in Marin County, California. EA : But the central past figure in the new film is that of your grandmother, Susi Martin, who I have had the privilege to know and befriend. We witness a continuum of past and present, which is a transmission.

These women perhaps become stand-ins for Susi, or her part-personas, the recurring personalities she tracked in her dreams — an internal community. You were also painting there in the 70s. EA : Ann was very important for me because she made me paint. In the 70s, while I was teaching philosophy of art at Dominican College, Ann was teaching art there.

When I met her for the first time she asked me provocatively if I painted. There are moments in life when certain words change your life. DM : From then on, you painted with a palette knife, a confident and definite technique! EA : Later Ann started weekly seminars at her own place. By word of mouth, in a few years, she had many people, as many as It was a beautiful place, two or three acres in Mill Valley, in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais.

Nature frees me; it leaves me free. Yosemite belongs to itself. Ann based her teaching on not teaching, on letting a student find their way. She was philosophically like her contemporary John Cage, embracing chance and play. Let people find what you cannot teach. At the same time, Ann had her hang-ups. She hated women who decorated themselves, who wore earrings.

It was something very deep. Her own sexuality was non-existent. DM : So her advocacy of free expression met its limits in decorative, feminine expression. Yet it was mostly women in the group. EA : Very few men; occasionally a husband would come. There were many foreign women: Austrian, German, English from Rhodesia — people homesick for Europe or elsewhere.

Susi was not American herself, was she? When she was 13 she was sent to boarding school in England because, luckily, her parents understood what was happening. Decades later, in her 50s, she fell into a deep depression and began to paint. She tried to tackle her crisis simultaneously with painting and with Jungian analysis. They functioned in two very different ways to process her experience of exile.

While her analysis was probing and penetrative, a way to dig into neuroses, painting freed her from it. I think that painting was a way for her to find some internal home or balance. I am where I am. DM : Thinking again about Ann and what you said about her denial of sexuality, I wonder about the role of the Zen attitude in all of this.

Zen Buddhism is very attractive in its openness, its lack of hierarchy. That might even be the purpose of Zen: to solve problems by escaping them. But there is something cold about it — more of a denial than a solution. There is more than lack of pain in a solution. EA : Well, Susi was the only person who helped me, once, over a very strong phobia.

If I come across one in a book, I cut the page and burn it. One day Susi and I were at Sight and Insight. We were going from one building to another along the hillside and there was a little garden snake, not moving. DM : —A natural introvert, but toughened from the trauma of what she went through during the war. DM : She really absorbed it, and one of the striking things about her dream diaries is the continuous mention of Nazis until the end of her life.

They kept arising in her dreams. Her diaries are dense with arguing voices and characters, while her paintings were dreamy, floating and beautiful. My paintings are the dream, the beauty of the world. My writings are full of conflict. DM : Is writing a way to give voice to the crises you see in the world? EA : Yes, writing is totally opposite to painting — same as with Susi.

You can say political things in paintings, like Picasso and Goya did. Goya painted about war. I wrote about it. All the arts have an inner balance to achieve. Rhythm is part of any art form. But also, each one has its own mystery. A painting you see. A short poem also has immediacy. But a film you have to memorise — you never see it whole.

A book is the same. DM : Each medium carries images differently. EA : This is an invaluable document! She took great care. And she writes well. DM : The diaries were only intended for an audience of two — her and her analyst — but they are very orderly.