During a recent writer’s residency in Northern Italy, authors Live Drønen and Dara Jochum came across the notebooks of Bracha L. Ettinger (b. 1948) at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare in Bolzano. The Israeli artist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher has been making considerable contributions to each of these fields for multiple decades. In the realm of psychoanalysis, Ettinger has developed terms such as “the matrixial,” and “wit(h)nessing,” both of which point to an understanding of the psyche as something which originates in severalty and that is a collective responsibility. For V/A and our ongoing focus on Immediacy, Live and Dara reflect on the notebooks, psychoanalysis, and motherhood, as well as on a broadened understanding of seeing as a multi-sensory process in which meaning is always generated anew in relation to the viewer.
Dara
I typed a note into my phone during the curator’s introductory speech, which by this point had lapsed into an unfaltering monologue about the masterpieces that were on view at the foundation. Half listening, I heard something about a sound piece, and then a story that caught my attention. Too late for context, the note reads: “One of the only female utterances in the bible is a woman saying her son’s name.” Somehow, as if these words triggered a signal that my subconscious sent straight to my prefrontal cortex, they were elevated from the sounds reverberating from the curator’s mouth. Pretty soon the words turned back into sounds as I wandered around the foundation, hazy from the heat and from the long lunch during which I had already consumed multiple glasses of local Pinot Grigio.
Only after discovering the notebooks tucked away in a back office did I realize the curator must have been speaking about Bracha L. Ettinger, an artist and psychoanalyst whose work I admired but had never seen in the flesh. Under the glass surface of vitrine tables, three of her books, bound by embroidered textile sleeves in oxblood red, pink and purple, lay wide open as if disgorging their precious contents. We see the intimate life of a notebook; words, paintings, sketches dissolving into each other, the pages now rippled from frequent handling and puddles of watercolor.
*
Live
It is as if I can only remember what happened outside of language that day. I’m standing on the pavement, gazing at the Dan Graham pavilion in the lush garden of the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare. A breath of fresh air after being guided through the David Lamelas retrospective, which is beautiful, or at least I think it is. I’m not really in a state in which I’m able to absorb anything and especially not art. It either moves me too much—and I can’t bear that—or not at all. We’re in Northern Italy, and this massive concrete building, I learn, is built from porphyry extracted from the hillside on which it is located. The mountain is translated into a delicate construction and money is everywhere. Money with good taste, that is. Sun in my bare face, standing there, I’m thinking that I did really like Lamelas’ still image of a flower arrangement in front of a sea view in Naples.
Shifting my gaze to the notebooks, I catch the words appearing as if bleeding, but in a substance thicker than blood, more like lava.
Dara snaps me out of the thought: She wants to show me something she eagerly insists I’m going to like. I trust her. Our aesthetic and intellectual interests often align. She points to the vitrine tables where Ettinger’s notebooks are displayed. I’m not familiar with the artist, and although I scan the lines with my eyes, the letters making up the wall text remain empty symbols. Shifting my gaze to the notebooks, I catch the words appearing as if bleeding, but in a substance thicker than blood, more like lava—uncontrollable yet tough; slow and steady, moving as trauma does.
*
Dara
I later look up the story that prompted my note and find it in the Hebrew bible. Rachel is in labor and she is dying. During her last breaths she names her newborn son Ben Oni, meaning Son of Sorrow. But soon after she dies, Jakob, the father and now widower, re-names him Benjamin, Son of Right. In what is, so I learn, one of the only instances of a woman speaking in the bible, she is being undermined by a man. At the Antonio Dalle Nogare Foundation in Bolzano Ettinger had transformed Rachel’s story into a sound piece that intermittently filled the concrete entrance space as a part of the exhibition Re-Materialization of Language. 1978-2022, which upon our visit had entered its final weeks.
Ettinger often uses stories such as these, emblematic of the marginalized position of women in history and storytelling, as a starting point for her paintings. This reverberates in her psychoanalytic and philosophical practice, in which she is perhaps best known for her concept of “the matrixial.” The notebooks exist within all these different realms of practice. About them Ettinger says[1]:
Mostly I write in the notebooks when I wake up and when I go to sleep. During the day, when I paint, I grab them from time to time to catch some ideas, images and words before they flee, and I mainly draw. When I’m out of the studio I take notes and draw — but I don’t go out often. I also scribble when I listen to lectures — but I hardly listen to lectures. I used to write my thoughts and draw when I worked with people, while I listened, but in recent years I haven’t worked with patients. I mainly take notes when I’m alone.
The notebooks seem to be the space between day and night, between psychoanalysis and painting, the translation from the unconscious, the immediate, the fleeting, to that which is materialized.
*
Live
At first sight Ettinger’s notebooks strike me in their beauty. I was drawn to the purples, the pinks, the reds—as I’ve always been, reminiscing how my younger self would feel embarrassed about this, them being the dully labeled “girly colors.” Upon researching Ettinger’s abundant theoretical work on the unconscious, the feminine, collective and individual trauma, the presence of these colors seems inevitable. Often, they resemble bodily trauma such as blood and bruising—insides out. Watercolors are splattered out on top of or beneath hand-written text in different shades, moving from purple to black in one of them, like clotted blood or a looming sky. Meticulously composed, the notebooks appear imbued with memory or something dream-like, in the sense of moving in and out of time-space and unconsciousness. What is to be found in these in-between states on which Ettinger seems to insist?
*
Dara
To me Ettinger’s pinks and reds look like the insides of a body. The bits that you usually don’t get to see, zipped up and carried around in a bag of skin. Like an organ, a placenta maybe. When, not quite a year ago, the midwives held up my baby’s placenta for me to see, I was amazed at how vibrant it was, and how structured; a landscape, with deserts and forests and pulsating rivers of red and blue blood. No wonder some people want to eat theirs, putting it right back on the inside where fleshy things belong. Since then it’s easy for me to see references to motherhood in almost anything. When looking at the notebooks I wonder, do Live and I both see a representation of something we long for to be represented? A reality becoming visualized or articulated, in which we seek the refuge of a familiar language?
*
Live
Dara’s associations with the placenta seem to touch something essential. Ettinger started developing the concept of “the matrixial” in the 1980s and early on described the matrix as a womb or uterus. She points to how we all come from the matrixial space, and how from the very beginning we are entwined with the other that carries us, continuing to use matrixial symbolically for our relationships to others. Defining the feminine-maternal sphere isn’t primarily an issue of gender for Ettinger, but rather an emphasis on the feminine as a dimension of the human condition, challenging the phallocentric understanding of subjectivity dominant in psychoanalysis. In hindsight my state of mind during my first meeting with Ettinger’s notebooks felt—as life’s coincidences often do—telling. In the midst of a transformative personal process and struck by a momentary feeling of my Self dissolving, I was more attuned to the underlying frequencies in which the notebooks communicated.
*
Dara
My own understanding of Self radically changed during my pregnancy, when all of a sudden I was accommodating another human on my inside. In turn this made me rethink the billions of organisms to which my gut was already home. I went from being an individual to being a multitude. Technically the placenta is an organ that belongs to the baby it shares a womb with, yet it digs itself into the mother’s flesh, sucking blood and nutrients from her. Morning sickness, which many pregnant bodies experience in the first months of carrying, is a symptom of the body’s natural defense against the interloper. Mother and fetus are not the same, but they are equally inseparable. “The possibility of joining without assimilation,” as Ettinger puts it, opens up a mode of subjectivity that is not static but in flux. Self and other constantly reshape each other, which means that as both Live and I stand inside the building on the hilltop looking at the notebooks, their meaning is configured in the relational space created between the two subjects. Equally, our own selves are reshaped in the moment that the notebooks become a part of us.
*
Live
In a lecture I find on YouTube, Ettinger says that both an artist’s and a therapist’s task often is to witness the witnesses “because we work with materials that are not necessarily ours […].” In an interview I read, she speaks of art and painting as a passageway to witness events one didn’t experience oneself. Expanding on what this word means, including and beyond seeing and bearing testimony of something, Ettinger has formed the term wit(h)ness to also encompass affect and other sensing that is not visual. In one of her notebooks that Dara finds a transcription of, Ettinger seems to consider such an expansion:
To observe (lehtibonen) in Hebrew comes neither from gaze nor vision, but from comprehension and reason (bin and tvuna). It indicates an inner process. You observe through the mind and through reflection; observation is interpretation. The very perception is change, like comprehension, like conception.[2]
In psychoanalysis one is being witnessed. Laying on an analyst’s couch is a state of losing control over one’s usual social defense mechanisms: one cannot read the other person’s facial expressions or body language nor adjust one’s own. It is a leap of faith that this vulnerable state is responsibly handled by the person behind you—whom you cannot see. In many ways, as seeing one another is removed from the equation, one can access other things, associate freely, enter a state where the unconscious is allowed to appear and not be blocked by automatized mechanisms—perhaps closer to observing from within, through the matrixial?
*
Dara
Live, Ettinger, and I all agree that seeing is not a purely visual process and that knowing is not purely cognitive. There are things that are known collectively, like a vibe shift or generational Angst, and there are things that are known affectively, like trauma—and they are by no means mutually exclusive. All of these examples expand beyond the realm of the expressible.
Who here could bear witness to my witnessing when I couldn’t even speak?
What eventually proved that I was indeed pregnant were the two red lines that appeared on the plastic blue stick I had peed on. But even before I had known without being able to explain how. My body just knew. This new knowledge brought on a feeling of alienation, as I was trapped in a body I no longer recognized and isolated by a barrier of sensations I had never experienced before and had no way of relating in an intelligible manner. Who here could bear witness to my witnessing when I couldn’t even speak? A pregnancy is far from exceptional; rather, it is the most integral part of life (as Ettinger points to, everybody comes from a womb). So doesn’t that make it all the more peculiar that there is no adequate language to describe this—in a way very mundane—phenomenon? Instead of attesting to the act of carrying, of being-with yet still separate, Western culture lives on a myth of outsourced creation by an abstract, disembodied figure of god.
*
Live
Encounters of wit(h)nessing within the matrixial emerge not only between humans but in the broader ecology that we are a part of. I’m thinking of Dara’s reflections of not only the human life growing inside her, but all other organisms we’re comprised of and co-exist with. I understand it as a mode of observing the world and others in which our bodies and minds are active agents, opening up to encounters of connectivity where also dreams, fantasy, spirituality, and desire is allowed to be present. To me, this unlocks a kind of knowledge that surpasses logic, much needed to put words to experiences that exist but are often wordless.
In encountering Ettinger and her work I’ve been reminded of a podcast I listened to some years ago, in which a therapist recorded sessions with (consenting) patients. One was a woman who had been blind since birth. Listening to her describing the world observed through all other senses but sight was—no pun intended—an eye-opener and clear testimony to how observation is fleeting and so much more than sight, containing knowledge stored in the body, affects, and senses. Reading Ettinger’s notebooks through a matrixial lens points to a generous understanding of what art can do. In seeing them with my eyes, I also observed them with all other senses, including my affective unconscious, becoming holders of a longed for knowledge.
*
Dara
In Western cosmology the female has always been perceived as more porous, more susceptible to invasion of both the physical and spiritual kind. What in medieval Europe was reasoned with a medical literalism—a female body’s higher humidity, being physiognomically wetter, softer, and therefore weaker than a male body— still partly pervades in modern thought. As the inability to contain integral solidity, porousness was constituted as lack yet Ettinger embraces it as potential. The feminine overflows, oozing outwards just as much as it is penetrable inwards.
The feminine overflows, oozing outwards just as much as it is penetrable inwards.
The inner processes triggered in both Live and I when encountering Ettinger’s notebooks make us think about, remember, and feel different things based on all the tiny situations that have made up our lives and beings so far. The amount of sleep we got, that last message I read on my phone, the fact that I decided to wear jeans this morning and am just slightly too warm. The fact that I miss my baby. Maybe one thing we can learn from Ettinger is that the meaning one can derive from the words and symbols we’re both looking at through the vitrine can in fact be individually and spontaneously constructed anew each and every time somebody chooses to observe. And if we remember to remain porous, we will also be allowed to constantly reconstruct ourselves anew.
[1] Pauwels, Roos (Ed.): Artworking, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger 1985 – 1999, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2000.
[2] See Roos, 2000.
