Javier Tellez

With La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (Rozelle Hospital, Sydney), 2004, originally conceived for that year’s Sydney Biennial, New York–based Venezuelan artist Javier Tellez continues his deeply personal investigation of what constitutes “normal.” A red velvet curtain divides the gallery, and inside one finds randomly placed chairs between video projections on opposing walls—a situation that leads to what can be called “spectatorial schizophrenia.” A ninety-minute rendition of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent classic La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) is screened on one side. The original film stretches the tribunal and interrogation scenes by making use of extreme close-ups of the protagonists’ face, and Tellez furthers this prolongation with the insertion of 174 new intertitles, which appear as words (“I am not crazy!” or “God tells me to fight the enemies of humanity!”) scribbled in charcoal on a blackboard. They manipulate the narrative, shifting the film’s context from the Middle Ages to the psychiatric clinic; the harried woman, insisting that she is Joan of Arc, is diagnosed with schizophrenia. This textual intervention is the result of a one-month workshop Tellez held with female inmates of a mental institution in Sydney, who chose the words. Twelve and a Marionette, 2004, the juxtaposed film, portrays these women. Their highly self-conscious and individual performances (one is using a puppet to role-play with her psychiatrist) tell touching stories of their lives, diagnoses, and their stigmatization by society.