Barbara Vandendriessche | An Exclusive Interview By Ida Salamon

Barbara Vandendriessche | An Exclusive Interview By Ida Salamon

“I seek the beauty in the tragical, in pain.”
Barbara Vandendriessche

Barbara Vandendriessche grew up in a small city Roeselare in Belgium, not far away from the French border. Her decision to study and practice theater directing and scenography brought her to Antwerp and finally to Brussels. “During the first years, I was sometimes overwhelmed, but then I learned to appreciate the city. Its complexity, its different municipalities and neighborhoods, its people”, says Barbara to Art Market Magazine in between her online teaching at the LUCA School of Arts in Leuven.
In an exclusive interview, she reveals the historical characters that are the inspiration for her work, her relation to photography, the Greek tragedy, and the people facing the uncertainty during the coronavirus pandemic.

Art Market Magazine: You were recently honorably mentioned in the Fine Art section at the Julia Margaret Cameron Prize award. This Victorian artist was famous for her romantic portraits of women. We often see women as the central figure in your photography, but other motives can also be found. How would you describe yourself as a photographer?

Barbara Vandendriessche: I like Julia Margaret Cameron’s work. Her photography work is very inspiring, and it was a great honor to be awarded this prize. Two years ago, I worked on Recanati, based on the Italian romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi’s life. I made a series about romanticism and melancholia with both women and men, but less with men indeed. Since then, the melancholy as an emotion returns a lot. I would describe myself as a photographer who wants to capture the emotions in a body. Not necessarily the beauty of the male or female body, but what is underneath. I want the photos to tell a story without being explicit. There must be a secret still to discover, or never to discover.

A.M.: The expressions and emotions you show, the colors, effects, and lights you use create a composition in harmony. Can you reveal to us more about your technique?

B.V.: I don’t know if I have a unique technique. I try not to think too much about it because I have learned that overthinking the process and gear might hinder my creation. When I start, there comes a sort of concentration and focus, and I improvise with the theme, the materials, and the models. Afterwards, while I edit, I also get in a sort of concentration and start working. The best moments are when you are surprised by what you see and never imagined it would turn out this good. I have to rely on coincidences, on mistakes that then yield a new approach.

A.M.: What is the message of your works?

B.V.: I don’t have a message. I just want to share something I like, something that can be touching and inspiring for someone else. Music, poetry, and film can comfort a person and give the option to escape everyday life’s ugliness or unhappiness. I think that I strive more towards that with my work. Art softens the morals, they say. It’s a cliché, but in my case, you can take that literally.

A.M.: How do you choose your models?

B.V.: I choose them, or they choose me. In the beginning, I worked with actresses and dancers I worked with in the past.
Because I knew they had fragility, they could show their emotions. I knew they would understand what I wanted to tell.
Later, people presented themselves to me. If I felt they were drawn to my images and not the posing itself, then I knew we could create something together. So I have made beautiful photographs with models who never modeled before, but they were willing to step into my world for a few hours and trusted me. That’s very important.

A.M.: Where and in what environment do you prefer to shoot the photos? Do you get your inspirations for the posing spontaneously, or do you proceed according to a plan?

B.V.: Since I have my studio, I prefer to shoot there. I can prepare everything in my own rhythm and place.
I can try out sets and compositions, adjust them, and throw them away when they don’t seem like anything I wanted. So yes, I prepare it well. But once the model is there, I start to improvise with everything that I had prepared. There are always, immediately, things that happen that were not prepared in advance. And very often, those are the photos I like the most once the project is finished.

A.M.: In the introductory sentence on your webpage, you wrote, “With my pictures and sculptures I seek for the beauty in the tragical, in pain.” This is a serious statement; what is the reason for it?

B.V.: I have studied theatre, and I have been working as a theatre director for almost 20 years. It is rather typical in theatre that we work with troubled characters, characters that have emotional issues. As a child, I saw the play Oedipus of Sophocles. I think I was eight years old, and I knew then that I also wanted to do that. The Greek tragedy has always been a common thread through my work. I made a Medea, a Phèdre from French playwriter Jean Racine.
I made my proper version of the Oresteia. I also made a play for children based on the Icarus myth, music, and dance performance based on the Minotaur myth, a monologue I wrote with another author based on the Narcissus myth but situated in the online world.
I often use Greek texts with theatre students to go to the basics of emotional understanding and to act.
The tragedy is intertwined with my artistic practice. My work as a photographer evolved from that.
For me, it is a continuation of what I already did but within a different medium. When I think about future projects, I start from a poem or a poet’s work, or I start from a character or a text. And I try to capture it in one image or in a series focused on that one idea. But I always try to make photography that has beauty in it. That is why I say that I seek beauty in the tragical, in pain. One could start from the same basic idea as I, but communicate in an ultimately different way.

A.M.: You have various talents; you also work as a sculptor and stage designer. How are these different talents interlacing?

B.V.: They always interlace. Except when I create a stage design for a director who wants to perform a door comedy.
Then I create what the script needs, and I try to express the director’s concept or the focus he or she wants to put in the text. But when I make photography, my way of looking at the set or using the materials and light is entirely influenced by my scenography knowledge.
I started a sculpting course because I wanted to separate the set design from the theater and evolve into installation art, which is entirely in line with that. But like every student, I had to start with modeling with clay after the living model. I thought it would be a disaster, but a new world has opened up for me, and I think it’s fantastic. I practiced, and with no particular intentions, my work was soon called tragic and tormented. Well. I also learned a lot about the human body by looking so closely at the nude models posing in class. That helps me to find the right words to say to a model for how to pose.

A.M.: Which theaters have you been working with, and what was your most exciting production?

B.V.: I have been working in theaters all over the region (Flanders, Belgium) as a freelancer. Grants are often awarded for four years. I usually was associated with a specific theater house for a few years; then, the management changed again, so I wandered around for many years. At some point, I worked for a small company (Barre Weldaad), where I made one production, every year. When the art director got ill, I took over the artistic direction.
I did that for almost ten years and made some of the productions I am most proud of, productions like Icarus.
The first real play that I artistically directed was my graduation performance, Medeamaterial, by Heiner Müller.
I worked intuitively without being tied to a house, subsidies, or expectations. With photography, I found that feeling again.

A.M.: Why did you choose photography as your primary source of expression?

B.V.: For almost 20 years, theater, text theater, was my form of expression, always combined with an emphasis on an aesthetically sophisticated set. But theater is a cumbersome form of expression.
You depend on many factors: money, a season schedule, your team of actors, technicians, possibly a writer, costume designer, set builders, etc., and I had the impression that I could no longer grow in that format, given the closed nature of the cultural field. On the contrary, because of the big savings in culture, the possibilities only became more limited, so I felt that I was going backward instead of growing.
My passion for the profession suffered. It became too much assembly line work. I felt that I could only grow by regaining that freedom from the beginning of my career. I especially still enjoyed designing sets and creating the theatrical image, and I loved doing that. Photography was a hobby, but I started to invest more and more in it, and suddenly realized that I was much happier. That was the point I understood; it is time to make decisions and dare to change.

Read the full interview on Art Market Magazine Issue #53