JOËLLE DE LA CASINIÈRE:
“Sophie had an absolute need to create. But there was also an urgency in her work. She must have sensed something was going on”
This also implies, however, that Le pays où tout est permis is not an easy or comfortable read, but a – sometimes violent – struggle. With time, the world, conventions and structures, relationships, identity, change, with the word and with oneself. A struggle that exudes an irresistible rhythm, which can be both hilarious and merciless at the same time, that you enjoy and that can disintegrate you; as complex and paradoxical as a living body. “It’s like a transcription of a mental state, more than a composition,” Chris Kraus says. “It was all written in one go, it wasn’t revised. I have this image of her writing as though she was throwing handfuls of dirt up against the wall, just throwing, throwing, throwing, and some of the substances that come out, are blindingly
brilliant and prophetic. Some of them make no sense, and then there will be this line that shines through the ages. To write this way, you need to reach a certain pitch. If you’re in a mundane sort of consciousness, you can do this kind of automatic writing, but no one’s going to want to read it. If you’re going to transcribe a consciousness, that consciousness has to be in some way charged and illuminated and larger than life.”
TRUTH AND PARADOX “Sophie, is this normal? Is this normal, Sophie?” we suddenly hear playfully and – in hindsight – very starkly in Dans la maison. “Almost everything that’s really deeply true is paradoxically true. It’s a trick for the mind to hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time. And it can be very painful,” Chris Kraus beautifully expresses it. In this sense, Sophie Podolski was a profound truth. “She contradicts herself all the time, but that doesn’t mean that either side is any less true,” Caroline Dumalin says, picking up on the idea. Sophie Podolski suffered from schizophrenia, a disease that dislocated her life and work. “Her mother and sister realized very early that she was different. As an adolescent, Sophie was often arrested for disrupted public behaviour, admitted to hospitals, and pumped full of drugs. Each time, it was a quick and easy solution that was imposed in a very authoritarian way. On the other hand, she lived in an environment in which insanity was not necessarily a problem and actually fed into the work and creativity. This all resulted in the situation that there wasn’t really anywhere for her to recover properly. By the time she was 21, I think she was just exhausted, running on empty.” “Her work exudes a vital necessity,” Joëlle de La Casinière says. “From her earliest years, she would constantly tell unbelievable stories, play pranks, and draw. She had her own palpable energy and an absolute need to create. But there was also an urgency in her work. She must have sensed something was going on. All the drugs that she took were to stimulate her to make her work. It was her way of taking care of herself. She never really talked about her disease, though there were some allusions to it in her work. There is an extraordinarily beautiful drawing in which she wrote: ‘Mon génie s’effrite. Je ne me plains pas. Je dis seulement que j’ai mal.’ And of course there were the crises. The first time she was taken to hospital was in 1970, I think. It was very brief, but she worked extremely hard afterwards. We felt as though she had felt a warning shot. When she was 20, she was admitted to La Borde [an experimental psychiatric clinic near Paris, where patients actively participated in running the facility – KS], after which she disintegrated completely. In one year, very
SOPHIE PODOLSKI
• was born in 1953 as the daughter of an American mother and Eastern European father, into an artistic and bohemian environment
BRUZZ | COVER STORY
parents’ chalet in Switzerland, and each wrote a book. Sophie opened hers, started writing on the first page, and didn’t stop until the pages ran out. Not a single page was torn out. It was an improvisation in the style of Thelonious Monk, one long, poetic stream into which she copied texts and drawings, creating a myth of freedom, anarchy, and another world.” “Sophie Podolski had an unfailing belief in immediate writing, and doing and thinking, living and working fast,” Caroline Dumalin says. “You might consider it as a kind of écriture automatique, but she always said that she found things all over the place, and then processed them all in her own machine. Le pays où tout est permis is thus very subjective and idiosyncratic, but sometimes a reflection of the time does filter through. For example, she frequently refers to Frank Zappa and to herself and the people in the house as ‘freaks’, who were the counterparts to the hippies and who symbolically resisted bourgeois society. This was not limited to the artistic world, but even permeated the way you expressed yourself in the clothes you wore and your lifestyle.” Writing was a living thing for Sophie Podolski.
• grew up in Bosvoorde/Boitsfort with her sister and mother, who was a ceramic artist and taught at the academy a stone’s throw from their home • left school very early because she was unable to settle in the context of an institution • experimented with woodcutting between the ages of 14 and 15 • knocked at the door of the Montfaucon Research Center in 1969, becoming a regular visitor of the artistic community, immersed herself in the anarchist spirit and experimented with drugs, free love, and radical art • at the same time led a nomadic existence in the city, where she was regularly picked up for divergent behaviour and briefly admitted to institutions • witnessed the publication of her only book, Le pays où tout est permis, in 1972 • in only five years, created an insane amount of absolutely unique graphic poetry, mixing words and images • was admitted to the psychiatric hospital La Borde in Paris in 1974 • disintegrated completely and committed suicide in late 1974
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