Interview with Chantal Michel

Born in 1968 in Bern, Switzerland, Chantal Michel stages herself in her photography, videos and performances. She uses her own body, mostly disguised or transformed, in order to reveal unconscious behaviour patterns. She often does this in confrontation to places unknown to her. In the photo series During the Whole Time… she can be seen acting in living quarters that appear lived-in yet are clearly deserted. Home as a place of protective familiarity becomes the stage for childlike-surreal play.

For your photo and video works you often take yourself to places where you cast yourself as an alien. Do you see the intimacy and security of home as being under threat? Are you staging a longing for the feeling of belonging?
Everything is under threat — constantly. Not only one’s home. Yes I do long for the feeling of belonging. And my work speaks of this longing. It’s the longing to find oneself through self-transformation. When I enter a room I sense whether I can confide in it. It’s like in a budding relationship. It’s about devotion — or about denial. And about the balance between things and people, between yesterday and today, between beauty and horror.

The photo series During the Whole Time… shows you acting in a depleted, completely dilapidated and deserted flat. Is there a concrete motivation for this?
Yes, certainly. The house exists — has indeed existed. I didn’t invent it; that would go beyond my powers. And I won’t say where the house is located, either. It belonged to an elderly man who I always found fascinating. He spent his whole life collecting things that he took home with him and lived with. In the end he lay lamed in an old people’s home and his house slowly fell into disrepair; it rained inside, the walls collapsed and his entire belongings rotted, everything was mouldy, inhabited by strange animals. Once I brought him a small porcelain sheep that I took from his house and gave to him when he was in the home; shortly before he died he gave it to me to keep. I was to feed it and look after it well.

What does ‘home’ mean for you?
It’s where I can be undisturbed, where I can be by myself. Where I sleep and work, where I feel comfortable, can create my own universe and don’t have to show consideration for anyone else. Home is where I’m unattainable.

In the photo series Egypt Family (2002) you go into the homes of families in Cairo — you penetrate the intimate sphere of another culture, as it were. Does this lend an ethnographical dimension to your work?
That’s a big word. What can I say? National categories mean little to me; I can find something foreign outside my own front door. Somehow Cairo seemed closer to me than Zürich. What happened was this: I was invited to Cairo in order to do an exhibition there. But I wanted more. I wanted to learn something from that culture, and as I stood in the middle of my living room it all became clear to me. The people laid their culture at my feet without saying a single word about it. I think I also have an ethnological look on my own culture. I’m interested in those fundaments of our behaviour that are conscious to us.

Your works often contain something unsettling, oppressive and claustrophobic. Could it be that the mentality of your native Switzerland is showing through here a little?
I don’t think so. It’s rather the petit bourgeois background that shaped me. And that isn’t all that different in France or Germany. I maybe feel restricted by the rules of everyday life, by what you have to do in our society in order to function. We shouldn’t underestimate Switzerland; it’s one of the most modern and cosmopolitan countries I know. For me everything is possible here, without restrictions. And the mountains that tower over where I live, they don’t restrict me; they fire my imagination.

Earlier on I asked you about ‘home’. How important to you is the reference to the culture and history of your native country?
Everyone’s marked by his or her origins, but the ‘history of Switzerland’ — for me it is an abstract term with which I have no rapport. Switzerland as home? Yes, if that denotes emotional ties to people and places. But I can also imagine
falling in love with the nature of Iceland, even if it is supposed to be very cold there.

Have we not meanwhile become citizens of the world, affected more by global influences than by local ones?
Globalization is an economic phenomenon, but as a cultural achievement it’s very deceptive. People who believe they have been influenced by anything global are expecting a bit much from themselves.