Marianna Simnett’s The Bird Game (film still), 2019. Courtesy the artist, FVU, the Rothschild Foundation and the Frans Hals Museum. — Marianna Simnett’s *The Bird Game* (film still), 2019. Courtesy the artist, FVU, the Rothschild Foundation and the Frans Hals Museum.

WEARING MANY MASKS

An interview with Marianna Simnett, with an introduction by Camille Henrot.

For Objektiv #19, we asked artists who have featured in our first eighteen issues to ‘pay it forward’, so to speak, and identify a younger artist working with photography or film whom they feel deserves a larger platform. Camille Henrot wanted to showcase Marianna Simnett, and we were fortunate to use Henrot’s words for this introduction, and her notes as questions for the conversation: In an interview with director of Nottingham Contemporary, Sam Thorne, Marianna Simnett explained how, when going to a doctor, she was subjecting herself to a sort of active passivity – actively going through a process where something was inflicted upon her. I found this very interesting, and it reminded me of the works of Orlan, an artist who used her own body as her canvas and also filmed her operations during the 1990s – something I felt was very significant and forward thinking at that time. Marianna’s perspective is dreamlike, sometimes with the element of psychoanalysis, and sometimes connected to fiction. I like the fact that political gestures are indirect in her works. She is unapologetic, and it is she who sets the rules, with a true loyalty and commitment to her own world of imaginary desires. I also like the fact that in Marianna's work, truth is ambivalent. She plays with confusing us, with what is true and what is not, what is her and what is not her. This toying with authenticity is bold today, at a time when we’re obsessed with transparency and truth. The category of judgment is also obsolete in her work – what is right and wrong is non-existent. In this way, Marianna activates a political and societal critique that has a certain degree of humour, a laid-back attitude. The act of modifying her voice is not only about modifying the voice. Yes, it is a reflection on gender, authority and how women are perceived in general, but it’s also an attack on the fetishism of the authentic, and the idea that you should be ashamed of any sort of moderation of your identity. Marianna‘s self-inflicted alteration of identity is something active and positive, a transformative cultural critique.

When talking about altering her voice, Simnett has mentioned Margaret Thatcher, and the prejudices people have about women. Female artists are particularly vulnerable to such prejudices, when they use themselves in their films: “Everyone gets excited when I stick needles in my neck. Especially men. I think they get turned on by it. They get all pumped up and it makes me want to vomit. I love playing dress-up. Most of my female characters have half their face hanging off, or worms crawling out of their mouths. I use the archetypal figure of the fair-haired heroine. I twist and distort the blondeness of fairytale beauty until it becomes horrific. My face is all over my work, so it’s a bit late to turn back. A great artist and friend of mine, Julia Phillips, inspired me to think more critically about handing over your identity when all you really should be known for is your work. She really protects that. It’s powerful and no doubt hard work to be the one saying no all the time.”

Marianna Simnett, Blood In My Milk (video still), 2018. — Marianna Simnett, *Blood In My Milk* (video still), 2018.

Simnett’s relationship with self-fiction, and the idea of sincerity and exposure of the self is very present in her practice: “You know yourself when you’re being real. But sincerity doesn’t have to be singular. I wear many masks. At her exhibition at MoMA, New York, I made a pledge to Adrian Piper that I’d never say anything I didn’t mean. And that was a promise — I felt able to sign that document. Everyone was saying, ‘What if you lie?’ And I said, ‘You can still lie and really mean it!’ All my work is semi-autobiographical. It’s not about factual events happening in my life, but I’m undeniably present. It’s weirdly more real than fact. It’s an anxious state I’m trying to convey, a frequency, a persistent nagging, something that other people can engage with as well. I’m frivolous with the idea of sincerity. I like to be wild and play different characters. But you have to stick your feet in the ground and do your thing, and not accept it when people tell you it’s wrong. That core belief in yourself has to be a hundred percent there. Otherwise, you end up in deep trouble.”

Simnett doesn’t just use herself in her works, however, but includes the people she happens to meet: “Surgeons, scientists, children … A girl I met on a farm became my surrogate, my mouthpiece – poor thing. She had to cut off her nose and sing about mastitis. Then she had to crawl up her own nostril and get chased around by an Albanian virgin. I don’t usually work with the same people twice, but she’s the exception – other than myself, of course. I perform when I know it’s going to hurt. I can do things to my own body (change my voice, induce unconsciousness) with a casualness that I couldn’t ask of anyone else – I’d probably be put in prison.”

This young girl was included in one of the pieces in the exhibition Blood In My Milk shown at the New Museum this year: “Isabel arrived as if she were a visitation. She chose me. Her presence reminded me of my own childhood, of being chastised for playing outside, of being bound up and taught to be afraid of men. She was nine at the time and I wrote the film through her eyes – or rather, her nose. She looked like a little Lolita — her strangely distinct features had a dreamy and eerie expression — but she was no starlet. No, Isabel had none of the precociousness you’d expect of a young girl in a movie. She almost didn’t seem to care, but then she’d burst out with these extraordinary performances, complete with red lipstick and ardent tongue. She tapped into the fears we project onto others and the lengths we go to in order to protect ourselves from imagined disease and corruption.”

Marianna Simnett, The Bird Game. — Marianna Simnett, *The Bird Game*.

Simnett also has a strong relationship to animals, both in real life and in her films: “Like Joan Jonas, with her dogs and fish, I regard the animals in my work as helpers. I’ve worked with cows, worms, cockroaches and dogs. My next film, The Bird Game, will feature songbirds and a talking crow. And I can’t talk about animals without mentioning Donna Haraway and her extraordinary kinship tales of multi-species. Animals are part of me. I had two pigeons — Winona and Scissors — but sadly, one flew away and the other got lice and died. I adored them. Jon Day, author of Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings and Why We Return, was breeding them and I got attached. Filipa Ramos, editor of Animals, is the queen of animal-thinking. She can spot beavers’ anal sacs in red lipstick, and taught me that platy- puses sweat milk from their skin. Her work inspires me to re-examine our physical existence alongside the millions of creatures living on this planet.”

The Bird Game will be Simnett’s first cinematic film: “I spend about nine months on average on each film. They’re like babies, pretty much. The Bird Game involves a wicked crow who seduces a group of innocent children into playing her game. It’s a dark tale of transgression, and stems from my research into bird brain activity during sleep. Birds have a miraculous ability to retain high levels of cognition during wakefulness even after little to no sleep. Right now, I’m also making a sculpture for a show called My Head is a Haunted House, curated by the incredible Charlie Fox at Sadie Coles, London.”

When watching Simnett’s works, the films of Dario Argento such as Suspiria, or Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day could come to mind: “I love Argento and Denis. The original Suspiria is one of my favourite films in the world. The remake is disgusting, except for the fun contortionist bits, and Tilda Swinton, who I adore. I love to binge. I’ll eat up everything by Walerian Borowczyk, then move on to the beasts — The Company of Wolves, Cat People, An American Werewolf in London — then settle into a Bresson dessert. I wasn’t allowed to watch anything when I was young. When I discovered movies, I was already in my teens. Since then, I’ve never lost my craving to be transported into another world by cinema.”

With a strong musical background, trained in piano and flute, music is very important. in Simnett’s work: “I write the lyrics and build a skeleton track, and then I work on it with a musician – so far, almost exclusively with Lucinda Chua. We talk about feelings and colours and moods more than notation. We want a feeling of paralysis, drowsiness, of something strangely medical happening to your body. She has a very unique talent for converting a mood into a sound. It’s like alchemy. We started working in a very light way, over about a decade. As we’ve grown as artists, the music has got more weird! Because we trust each other, we dare to go further. And now I’m collaborating with other musicians too. It’s really exciting and a crucial element of the work. Hopefully, I can release a spooky medical EP one day, full of singing bones and animated organs. I’d love that!”

Marianna Simnett, Blood in My Milk, 2018. Still 5-channel HD video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Jerwood/FVU Awards. — Marianna Simnett, *Blood in My Milk*, 2018. Still 5-channel HD video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Jerwood/FVU Awards.

For the coming two weeks: A rare online screening of The Bird Game (2019) by Marianna Simnett, in light of the COVID-19 outbreak. 10th April 2020 - 24th April 2020. See the film here.

We wanted the first book from our Objektiv Press-series to consist of twelve conversations from previous issues and to be launched during this year’s Les Rencontres d’Arles. Due to the current situation we will focus instead on our two upcoming essay publications and share (and republish) the dialogues online. This conversation is from Objektiv #19.