Women Cinemakers meets
Geeske Janßen Lives and works in Leipzig, Germany
„Of The Old School“ is a short film which deals with light, skin, colors and slaughter. It shows in an atmospheric and memorable way traditional butchers at work.
An interview by Francis L. Quettier and Dora S. Tennant womencinemaker@berlin.com
Hello Geeske and welcome to : we would like to introduce you to our readers with a couple of questions regarding your background. You have a solid formal training and you studied in Leipzig, Valencia and Braunschweig: how did these experiences address your artistic research? Moreover, how does your cultural background direct the trajectory of your artistic research? I grew up in a small village in northern Germany. My father is a pastor and my mother is an art teacher for
adults. And of course i did not want to do, what my mom was doing. But over the years, with out really noticing it, I kind of stepped into my mothers footsteps. Doing a lot of theatre and dance during my teenage years brought me to performance art. I loved the authenticity of it and so i laid all my focus on it during my first years in Braunschweig and Leipzig. After a while I wanted to find a new way of expressing myself, without it being me in the main center of my artwork. So I started a documentary work with two old ladies. We worked together for half a year just talking about love. In this process I mainly used video, photography and audio. And I recognized that these techniques give me a lot of different possibilities.