MODI DI MORIRE draws on Ingeborg Bachmann’s unfinished novel cycle ‘Ways of Death’ (Todesarten), developing an associative, dreamlike structure from Bachmann’s textual fragments, recorded and partially literary processed dreams, cinematic tableaux, and fragmented filmic elements. At its core lies the question of female individuation within social and linguistic structures—and of those “ways of death” through which Bachmann describes the processes of violence, silence, isolation, and inner disintegration that render self-determination impossible under patriarchal conditions.
STATEMENT BY DIRECTOR TINA-MARIA FEYRER:
“MODI DI MORIRE is a multi-channel expanded cinema project situated at the intersection of film, space, language, and sound. Drawing on text fragments by Ingeborg Bachmann, her recorded dream protocols, as well as cinematic tableaux and a multilayered sound composition, the installation creates a spatial arrangement of projections, voices, and sound. The installation is not an adaptation of its literary source but an autonomous artistic engagement with the spaces of thought and experience that Bachmann’s work opens up.
At the centre lies the question of the possibilities of female individuation within social, linguistic, and cultural structures. At the same time, the work revolves around those ‘ways of dying’ by which Bachmann means not physical death, but processes of alienation, speechlessness, isolation, and inner disintegration—processes that often remain invisible and yet become deeply inscribed in the body, in language, and in the possibilities of female self-determination.
For me, MODI DI MORIRE emerged from the desire to create a filmic and spatial framework where contradictions, ruptures, and ambiguities can remain unresolved. The multi-channel installation builds on this openness inherent in the material and translates it into space. The multi-channel format makes it possible to experience different temporal layers, perspectives, and states of perception simultaneously. Images answer one another, contradict each other, or drift apart. Visitors move through an open constellation of fragments that reconfigures itself with each position they occupy within the space.
MODI DI MORIRE is intended as an invitation to enter those spaces where memory, language, the body, and imagination are drawn together. The work looks for forms of attention, not answers.”
DIRECTOR’S BIO:
Tina-Maria Feyrer is an Austrian-Italian artist and filmmaker whose work is situated in the fields of experimental film, expanded cinema, and video art. In her work, she combines directing, cinematography, and editing to create dense, atmospheric visual worlds. Thematically, she engages with dream logic, memory, archetypal motifs, and mythological questions, with a particular focus on the visualization of inner psychological spaces and unconscious processes.
She studied Russian Studies, Philosophy, and Theatre, Film, and Media Studies in Vienna and Moscow, earning her doctorate in 2008 with a dissertation on the relationship between language and thought. After many years working as a production manager and assistant director in theatre, she now works primarily in experimental film, expanded cinema, and video art.
Feyrer lives and works in Austria and Italy. She founded the artist collective herrmauser, which develops and presents interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of film, video, literature, and sound.
