Database for Diveristy and Inclusion in German Studies: Cultivating DIB in and beyond the canon

Femininity, Ecology, and Mythology in the works of Janaina Tschäpe

Janaina Tschäpe is a German and Brazilian artist who paints, sketches, and sculpts, in addition to working with photography and film. A dreamlike quality characterizes her often melancholy works which explore and blur the boundary lines between nature and artificiality, life and death, and animals and human beings. Tschäpe frequently casts a mythological gaze on the human body, frequently employing feminine figures from Brazilian and German folklore as avatars for her “biogeochemical” reflections. Within the bygone world of myth, Tschäpe returns to the forest and the sea, magical settings removed from a horizon line that would grant the artist and the observer perspective. According to Tschäpe, the inaccessibility of traditional perspectives enables her to enlist the environment itself as a collaborator. In “Blood, Sea” (2004), for example, the turbulent waters of the ocean manipulate the strange latex-prosthetics which adorn, extend, and even obscure the bodies of Tschäpe’s models, assuming as much creative control as the artist herself. Such a creative practice further expresses the mutual dependence of organisms and ecosystems, while also relativizing to some extent human agency.
Tschäpe’s interest in the mythic realm casts into relief a web of influences and associations stretching from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. Keen observers of her works have often noted the importance of eighteenth-century theorizations of the sublime in nature, and Tschäpe herself has often cited the influence of the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich as a major influence. At the same time, her fantastic latex structures remind viewers of Rebecca Horn’s work with prostheses (Finger Gloves, Unicorn?). Thus, Tschäpe’s artistic works form a bridge not just between Europe and the Americas or the mythic and the real, but also between the past and present of artistic work. Indeed, there is much in her work to be explored in both the classroom setting and in scholarship, including:
themes of gender and sexuality
intersections of sexuality and ability
ecofeminist responses to the concept of “Nature,” as well as
the role of the human being within the contemporary climate crisis
the role of the arts in expanding notions of “Germanness”

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