Your images are stunning! How did you meet and begin to create such beautiful work?
je’NI: We met in ‘09 in New York. I was dancing with an avant-garde improvisational performance group. Benno was our percussionist and musician. One voice, one pair of hands sounded like several, calling from another world, with instruments attached to both his ankles. His music and my dance accelerated for an hour until we bombed the space and as the audience proclaimed “it all turned to light”. The dancer became the drummer and the drummer became the dancer. We became this one unit of experience. At the end of the performance, Benno put his arm around me and said, “With what you and I just did, we could change the World!” and I replied, “Well then, when do we start?”
That’s incredible. You were both able to be in the moment and make such a significant statement.
je’NI: Spontaneity is the foundation upon which we create our work. Ours is a sovereign, simultaneous, synergistic, intuitive process so we don’t always know what we’re going to do until we do it. We have to trust. If I think too much about what we’re doing, my critical mind and eye obstruct my clarity of vision and the magic and meaning of our creation becomes harder to find, for it reveals itself to us in these surrendered moments.
Benno: Yes, the lack of initial concept is at the forefront of what we do.
What is the technique which you use to generate such powerful images?
Benno: The photos come from digital photo sequences, captured at 10 frames per second, so they’re film frames. je’NI is in movement most of the time. We create our work with a pro digital SLR camera, rhythmically placing this footage in between video footage. I use film tools in post production. We blade run between video and photo because we both think musically. These emotions and perspectives are transformed into each image.
The emotions seen in your work are so strong - really emanating off the page. They seem to call the viewer to experience their own feelings and reactions.
je’NI: Women and men are transformed by the imagery. I am in the process of healing personal wounds and thus collective buried trauma. It is in this embedded, over exacerbated, polarized and distorted contextual framework that women present themselves - sensually and sexually. I expose and explore this without exploiting it. I blade run through it. I turn it inside out without them realizing it. I play with these ideas, dance with them honorably. I venerate even though some may claim I defile. They’re the ones who can’t see the humor in it.
How do men view women through a different lens, other than sexually?
je’NI: Actually, I’m re-contextualizing what sexy is – it’s the look in my eye that draws them in, not my form. My form is the container for the feeling that’s being exuded. Men are most moved and touched by the photos that show me looking at myself and Benno captures my self-reflection, both literal and metaphoric.
Benno: When she looks at herself, there’s a very transcendent and other worldly quality to the images.
I see you have a broader agenda and concept with the polarities that you want to demonstrate. You don’t have to be confined. And, you’re continually re-contextualizing your work.
Benno: It’s all about beauty; true beauty is without any judgment or category. je’NI is the proxy to express this beauty – a frontrunner for all these women to express themselves. Hers are the unsung songs of beauty and love, which are so missing in this world beyond art. It is a mission by itself. We didn’t choose this mission. There are male and female aspects in all of us. It’s about polarities. Intuitively, I can reveal my female aspects, and it’s like a map for me. I can see you. We work very seamlessly together. This art is made for everyone. We embrace and live the contradiction. The female aspects have to grow by surrendering to this process. Some of it will always stay mystical. Beauty is the authority.
Who or what would you consider to be major artistic influences in your work?
je’NI: I admire Gustav Klimt for his ability to simultaneously reveal profanity and innocence in his female subjects. Also included are early 20th century French fashion illustrators, Louis Icart, Charles Martin and Georges Barbier for their way of portraying what is sexy and sensual about a woman in the most elegant and playful of ways.
Benno: It’s a yet to be categorized Renaissance with true, original feeling and content. It’s classical and romantic. In a way it’s old fashioned. It’s Nouveau Retro. It expresses honesty, trust, and real inner beauty outwardly revealed.
I can definitely see the classical and romantic aspects in your work. Can you speak about the images, The Fissure and Through the Heart?
je’NI: In The Fissure, I dance within a photo sequence and Benno captures my reflection. I’m cathartically aware of myself, remorsefully so. It almost hurts to move.
Benno: The Fissure shows us the ugliest and most beautiful elements of polarity’s struggle, the inner war, unable to be concealed. In Through the Heart, she holds a fan. I mirror flipped the image double and an arrow appeared.
je’NI: I felt so sexy that day. I wanted to tease, taunt, and be naughty. I could almost kill with my beauty, bring them all to their knees, ever hungry for more – never to be satisfied.
Benno: It’s about an elegant, upscale society and its perversions. High-end collectors are reflecting on their own life and their vision of women and she shatters this with coy grace. The arrow is directional, an unintentional intention.
What are your next projects?
je’NI: We will be creating an art documentary film and photo book for the creation of the final and unfinished Louis Bourgeois sculpture to be housed in the new city center of Vienna, the Wien Mitte.
Where do you see your work in the future?
je’NI: We want to discover new ways of studying and documenting anthropological science through beauty. We will fuse storytelling with fashion, music, and dance through visual, philosophical and literary narrative. There will still be imagery, but more in the video medium. It will be more stylistically fashion based, but that’s just the container. We want to find the new view of fashion and style – something that speaks more to true beauty.
Theresa Barbaro
