Christine Preiser
christine preiser is a scientist by day and a painter by night.
inaccessible poetry
Going through existential grief and horrors after multiple losses of people and futures, I was on the brink of losing myself and my sanity. I turned to writing as my all-time lifeline to slowly rebuild in a place full of ghosts, releasing grief trough the movements of my hands and translating it into poetry. In my refusal to re-read and to ever return, I layered line after line to ensure inaccessibility. While trying to decipher the letters, the viewer immerses into the brain fog and frustration of a person who tries to find a way out of a situation they never wanted to be in. That was my artistic interpretation of my survival strategy.
A year later – after gaining some distance to the emotional cause of the poems, they helped me to understand a far deeper refusal. That the brain fog and its accompanying mild to disturbing confusion were not signs of an isolated state of emergency, but the incessant background noise at the core of my existence, of living with the unknown that eventually turned into four-lettered diagnostic labels which offered names and new boxes but no easy fixes. I had become such an expert in denying me to myself that “You? No, you don’t seem so” became a recurring echo by loved ones and medical experts whenever I tried to de-hide the inaccessible poetry of my daily struggles.
Years later – my brain still is a pinball machine. The poetry remained and hiding and de-hiding stayed functional strategies to navigate spaces and stigma. The question of sanity has lost its minaciousness though
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