Nina

TEXT

My Body is Just a Shell is a 5'3'' long film I did on/with two intersexual people I met in 2021 in Slovenia. With this video I want to show two different stories of two people who had a very similar starting point as children but lived very different lives because of their parents' decision. At the age of one, Eros's parents allowed doctors to operate on him to be a woman, which caused him a lot of health problems, but also a lot of psychological pain, as he felt more a male than a female, but he never understood where this desire came from. His parents never told him that he is an intersex person, he realised that when he was 23 years old through meditation. When he started to look at his medical papers from when he was a baby, he also discovered about the operations the doctors performed on him at that time. His parents never accepted him as a man, they called him Anja until the end. Luka's mother educated herself on the subject and their rights and refused to allow the doctors to operate on him, and his family embraced him for who he is.

Eros by the river, photograph taken by me, 2022

I started to work on this project because in 2021 a friend recommended me to read an instagram account of a doctor, who gives all sorts of health advices. In one of her posts she wrote 'my dad was operating on intersex babies' which shocked me, because I didn't know about these operations. I started researching on intersex people in Slovenia, but there was no information except for online interviews with Anja Murgelj, who I later found out had changed name to Eros Murgelj. I tried to make a contact with him and I finally did through a photographer from one of the interviews. I first met Eros in February 2022, Luka and Eros met in March and than met each of them a few times before we all met together. I asked Eros to record their conversation with his phone, because I was currious about their conversation. The voice recordings ended up to be an hour long conversation of them speaking very openly and honestly about their life experinces as both being intersex people. They allowed me to use the recordings and I wanted their voice recordings to be the focal point of this movie. The video starts without an image, just with the sound. You can hear birds singing in the background, it is subtle, but it is also very important for the mood of the film. The voice recordings were made in nature, as Eros always proposed to meet in nature. He always said he only really felt accepted by the nature, the other title I had in mind for the film was Nature heals.

The video might appear linear and simple, but I wanted to do it this way, to really put enhance on the narrative, which is quite dense and heavy and probably hard for a viewer to embrace it in those 5 minutes. The narrative has a crescendo which bulids up until the end, when I also show faces of both of them through the visuals, which enhance the messagge of the video. I edited the first draft of this film very intuitively a day before my first tutorial at PZI with Barend. My first edit was actually very similar to the final film. I took part of the voice recordings which was an introduction to a story and added videos of Eros's body parts to it, Luka didn't want to be filmed. I showed their faces only at the end of the video, which might come as a surprise, because their voice could be male or female, it is hard to define their gender if you don't have a picture. I latter added another two minutes of conversation and left the part in the end where they laugh together, because I was able to have 5 minutes instead of 4 minutes, which was the limit for Eye.

I was working with the material I already had, because I was not able to go to Slovenia at this point to shoot more and now i cannot do it because Eros died, so these are my only recordings I did with him. It is interesting how precious becomes a video of a person in the moment they are not anymore phsicaly present on Earth, to me video holds more presence and memory than photography, but even more their voice recordings. I hope this structure evokes emotions and sets a strong mood in the video, so the audinece can embrace their stories. Both the happines to live the life of such a special being, which can understand other beings on a more open REALM?, live more freely, look beyond social constructs and at the same time holds deep sadness of being rejected for who you are, in Eros's case by his family. In october 2022 I started to think the short video for the Eye could be made from existing videos and recordings I had from the summer. I combined my video recordings I did with Eros and Luka in summer 2022 and their voice recordings they recorded at their first meeting also in summer 2022.

Since the time I met with Eros in spring 2022 I was asking myself how to approach the topic, how to present his body, which became something else that would be without medical intervention. How to not objectify it, but to question/chalenge the medical practice which is obviously outdated. How to approach the topic? How to bring his story to a public realm and how to change things in collaboration with him, because he wanted to change things for other intersex babies, so they didn't have to go through what he has. Not only psysical problems but also medical problems and complications which were caused by the surgery.

Grave stone of Murgelj family, Eros (Anja). Photograph taken from online source

It is hard for me to write this text, because I couldn't say goodbye to Eros, he died unexpectedly and suddenly. He died in December 2022 because his body collapsed, due to him stopped taking hormons for adrenal gland, which also influenced his hormones to look more as a female, for which doctors claimed him to be as a baby and operated on him. I don't feel this film is a project, but is more part of a mission. I did the film, but more as an introduction for people to start thinking about this topic than making an artistic document. These are real people, not some fantasy, imaginary world, or some thoughts I had in my dreams. These two people suffered their whole life just because they could not be considered a man or a woman, which system forced them to choose from.

I also wanted to work with him on making this topic more visible in Slovenia and banning the operations completely. I want the Republic of Slovenia to ban the unnecessary operations, since the operations on intersex are just cosmetic operations, they are not necessary. I am in touch with NGO association and would like to invite more people to collaborate in the process, with their knowledge and thier support in all ways possible. I would like to meet with the Minister for Health and Minister of Law in summer 2023. I would like to I want people to know this is still happening. I would like to make more research on how this transition was done in Germany and the Nethelrlands??, where operations on intersex babies are already banned and can be decided by them when they become 18 years, considering also the legal documents, where you need to determine your sex. I would like to film this meetings as a material for a documentary.

I was always interested in marginalised groups, people from the edge of society, being are pushed away, maybe strange, people who do not conform to so called reality. Also in people's psyche, fears, like fear of death, fear of unknown, anxieties, mental health and stygma of it, stygmas of any kind. I am also interested in what people give up for their comfort, how people are alseep by the comfort of everyday life, stereotypes, social rules, social expecations, how West is distancing from nature, etc. What are other ways of living together, systems which include all living organisms and forms, not just people, animal and plant rights. I am interested in power structure, how money value money changed through centuries, jobs as new slavery sysyems, in different angles of justice, in how to invite change. I am interested in art as a form of change but also as a space that embrace različnost and enables space for open talks. What are the ways to change things, where does the power of change come from, can it arise from one person or it has to be mass of people.

HOT SUMMERS You're so cold, he said to her. You're so cold when you're sober, he said. Cold as this spritz.

I have worked on the topic of marganilized groups before. In 2014 I did poezin, a book of poems and photographs which I wrote and took while living in Bavarski dvor, an area of Ljubljana near the train station, where there were many homeless people. I had a room with a balcony facing the square, which was in between tall residental modernistic blocks. Manly concrete, only a few birches, the echo was so loud I could hear people talking to my balcony on the 9th floor. The poems are fictional but are inspired by events and conversations from this sqare and the surroundings of the square. I met, talked and had a drink with some people I took photographs of and listened to their stories. Now the area is chnaged, two new luxurious hotels were bulid in the last five years, so this poezin is also a document of change and gentrification of the area. This work was exhibited in Galerija Photon and is part of the permament collection of P74, but the question that arised at that time for me was what can an art work change when displayed in a gallery, museum? This is something I am interesting in and would like to examine more.

Rehearsals on stage at the National theatre Oslo, Norway, february 2021

Nina on stage at the National theatre Oslo, Norway, february 2021

Another project that influenced me a lot is a theatre play after the text Beyond our Power by Byornson. In 2021 Slovene Theatre Director Tomi Janežič was invited to do a show at National thatre in Oslo, Norway. I was an assitant of Production Designer Branko Hojnik. We started to work on the play, analysis of the texts and production deisgns already a year before. When we were in Oslo, in the middle of the rehearsals the show was postponed due to Covid situation. The text is still amazingly accurate today, it talks about men in power, who extract from the land and take advantage on people who actually live in the village and on the opposite those people, who live there and have enough of this toxic power relations. So at one point, when all these men meet in a castle up the hill, one of the villagers does a bomb suicide and kills them all, with only one survivour. This act opens up many questions, from how to make a change from bottom up, the rights of workers, etc.. Is it excusable to kill twenty people to make a better living for thousands, is this an act of bravery or an act of despair? Where does greed come from, etc. I just got recently very inspired by the documentary 'All the Beauty and the Bloodshed' on Nan Goldin. It shows her life work, how her photographic work changed and influenced the life of many, the strugle of gay people with AIDS, her life and her recent protests against Sackler family. As I have a background in theatre two other influences are Christoph Schlingensief, especially his project Ausländer raus! and Milo Rau. I am also very much inspired by art works of Tadej Pogačar, Mladen Stilinovič, Joseph Beuys, Warner Herzog, Ulrich Seidl, Susan Meiselas, Sinéad O'Connor, Svetlana Makarovič, ...

The other thing is that I read and wrote a lot when I was younger, fiction and poetry, but I feel like I lost that muscle by now. I want to work on short stories, fiction and scripts, because I want to use story telling and narrative in my projects to invite change, evoke strong emotions, enable imagination, invite freedom to communal thought and behaviour. I would like to evolve my style, which might look simple by the first glance, but I do so on purpose, because I want to talk about heavy or hidden topics through humour and lightness to bring the awareness to the spectator by non evasive way so they can open up for the messagge. Around Christmas time I have recorded four conversations of two homeless people, it is fictional but inspired by my walks through the city of Rotterdam. Now I only have those recording, but I would like to combine them with another medium, maybe video or instalation, but I don;t know how to find something that would work with it.

I want to allow myself to create more freely, to be more experimental, to explore variety of mediums, not only video and sound, but maybe other mediums, with which I haven't worked until now like touch, emotions, smell, big instalations, performance, AI, digital space, ... I would like to detach myself from titles such as a visual artist, a production designer, an architect. I would like to (re)search more, experiment more, create more, enjoy more, travel more, explore furter, do more interviews, meet more people, see the World, maybe the Moon, maybe the Universe. With the speed of technology development it feels now that everything is possible. So, let's go!  

Cover photo of poezin Pesmi z Bavarca, I took this photo at a party in Ljubljana, 2016