Elisabeth von Samsonow
La Femme Habitable
How to squat on a woman
(12‘, A 2020)
Produced by THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES‘ NETWORK (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) in cooperation with THE LAND OF THE GODDESSES (Alberndorf and Haugsdorf, Lower Austria) for the Collateral Project INFINITE VILLAGES/ MANIFESTA 13
curated by Francisca Viudes
The performance video LA FEMME HABITABLE unfolds the registers of dwelling, on a site within the LAND OF THE GODDESSES (Alberndorf im Pulkautal, Lower Austria) which was purchased and founded by a group of artists and cultural workers in 2020.
Founding the LAND OF THE GODDESSES was motivated by the large number of prehistoric Venuses which were discovered in Lower Austria, among them the reknowned Venus of Willendorf. A Mongolian yurt designed as the in-situ-parliament of THE LAND OF THE GODDESSSES provides the stage set for a series of gestures by which the performer and co-performers scan ecologically relevant intertwinements of bodies: the large body of Gaia, mother earth, the landscape, the surrounding horizons, the woods, the humans and other beings, plants and fruits.
The mongolian tent, built upon a paleolithic mammouth hunterer site from the time of he Venus of Willendorf, acts like a hot spot or trigger point in this setting, like a portal for entering the fairy tale dimensions of the land. The agencement of mother earth, the milieu and the bodies of the performers unveil to which extent the „body producing body“, namely the female body, serves as an origin to all forms of habitat..
script and set design: Elisabeth von Samsonow
performer: Elisabeth von Samsonow, Evelyn Plaschg and Florian Holzer, Karl Koran, Elisabeth Koran, Gerda Schaludek, Luna
camera: Mira Kluge
postproduction: Elisabeth von Samsonow and Mira Kluge
sound and vocals: David Sanderson Austria
Austria, 2020, 13‘10
Photo Credit: Elisabeth von Samsonow
In this lecture-performance Elisabeth von Samsonow presents the key ideas of her eponymous book in a self-commenting hysterical attack. She shows how the figure of the girl represents not just the left-out, ephemeral, powerless neutrum in the family romance but turns out to be the core player in totemic transavantgarde. Mirroring and critizing concepts from the Deleuzian/ Guattarian Anti-Oedipus, Elisabeth von Samsonow's book Anti Electra unfolds how the substance of the girl - far beyond the reality of girlisms - fires contemporary media culture, gender concepts and today’s revisions of ontological positionalities.
The Brezel Goddess’ Lounge by Elisabeth von Samsonow shows two sculptures and drawings. The pretzel is present as an overarching mathematical form by which its inner relationships of forces become tangible. The Brezel Goddess herself proves to be a liminal figure between a banal everyday world (having pretzels every day) and a radical metaphysics of the production of bodies. The pretzel is the primary signature (a double helix in a crescent moon) of the kind of plasticity that must be taken as a requisite when dealing with the body. The pretzel is the favorite object of sculptors and theorists who explore bodies producing bodies (also: mother, the future of bodies). The exercise machine repurposed as a Doe Bride (created for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich) serves as a contemporary meditation machine in this context. A little prayer book with pretzel mantras will be published in conjunction with this event.
A special edition is brought out by Gallery Andrea Juenger Vienna on the occasion of the exhibition „Th Parents‘ Bedroom Show“ by Elisabeth von Samsonow and Juergen Teller at Spazio Ridotto/ Zuecca Project Space Venice 2019.
PRESENTATION OF THE CATALOGUE 
5.10.2018 - 27.1.2019 - Thursday, 4th of October 2018, 7pm
The works by Sarah Decristoforo, Fabiana Faleiros, Alex Martinis Roe, Elisabeth von Samsonow and Ashley Hans Scheirl, most of which were realized specifically for this exhibition, generate non-normative experiments of sex in drawing, sculpture, video, sound and installation. What kind of visualizations, embodiments, apparatuses, settings, texts and tutorials permit us to anticipate a sexual economy that is based on excessive exchange and radical solidarity? How could we effectively edit the scripts of our sexual identities? What roles are played by prosthetic devices and hormones, citations and yoga, over-expenditure and waste, the clitoris and digital interfaces in this process? 
28.9.2018-10.3.2019
The exhibition at Galerie Lisi Hämmerle (opening on Saturday, 14 July 2018) presents sculptures, paintings, drawings, and photographs. Connecting these works is the theme of the "everyday marvels"—those things that have grown inconspicuous through (practical) use, though they contain plenty that is incendiary. Take the pretzel, for example. Artfully looped, it is not only a welcome snack, it also represents a mathematically highly sophisticated topos that could well serve as a model world. The same applies to braids. Or to wood, which is the real everyday mystery, at least for the sculptor, who prefers to work in basswood.