FAMILY CONSTELLATION WITH A FOX

A part of Gernot Wieland’s new film addresses a process whose urgency is widely acknowledged, yet has rarely been successfully put into practice: the healing of society from the traumatic effects of the male-dominated, colonial Western art history. And this history is only one among many narratives that shape social order—stories which, according to Walter Benjamin, include fairy tales—that produce and reinforce systems of oppression.

The chosen therapeutic method is family constellation. The representatives are ceramic figurines that embody paintings by the “great masters,” but also mother, father, the ego, Freudian psychoanalysis, and a fox. This culture-historical family constellation may reveal power structures, but it does not reverse the losses. We do not only lose people—Western art history itself is built on loss: its framework is sustained by dispossession, colonial plunder, and the exclusion of marginalized groups.

Like a storyteller, Wieland’s voiceover meanders through memories that sometimes spread their wings and fly off as fictions, only to crash back down onto the hard ground of historical reality. Wieland’s tragicomic film and the collaborative lecture performance begin with his upbringing in postwar Austria during the 1970s and 80s—within an "environment of repression." The tension between humor and seriousness holds something inherently childlike: children observe something—and speak it aloud without mercy. Benjamin, in his theses on Marxist children's theater, attributed something revolutionary to the power of their gestures and words. Perhaps Wieland’s melancholia lies in mourning the loss of this childlike gaze. Even when his film treats themes with a certain lightness, the weight of loss, violence, and trauma is never absent, and the inner pulse—like thick blue veins across a hand—remains faintly visible from the outside.