La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc: Rozelle Hospital (2004)
Installation, two channel projection with red velvet curtains
Video (Twelve and a Marionette): 40min. 55sec.
Video (La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc): 97min. 2sec.
Commissioned by Biennale of Sydney, 2004 and filmed on location at Rozelle Hospital Sydney, with wlve women who experience
Installed at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia as part of 14th Biennale of Sydney On Reason and Emotion 2004.
“Téllez spent a month in workshops with a group of 12 women at an institution in Sydney. After viewing the Carl Dreyer film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) the patients wrote new intertitles. Unsurprisingly, they reconceived it as the story of ‚JDA’, committed for believing she was Joan of Arc, suffering from grandiose visions and auditory hallucinations’. Presented as a two-channel piece, the revamped silent film is accompanied by a series of intimate interviews with the co-creators. One woman conducts a dialogue with a marionette therapist, perfectly ventriloquizing the language of the professional mental health worker; another reads journal entries detailing her electroshock treatments. A young woman offers a giddy monologue of her institutionalization, while explaining her knowledge of Morse code through a past life memory. Suddenly, she breaks into song, a moving hymn proclaiming her resistance to rules and bureaucracy.”
(Steven Stern, FOCUS: Javier Téllez, in: Frieze, London, June – Aug. 2008, p. 210)
