Lea Draeger und Linda Peitz
Ökonomische Päpste und Päpstinnen
Interview

Linda Peitz: In the exhibition you are showing your series “Economic Popes” for the first time in its preliminary entirety. How did you come to deal with these characters and what role does the system they form play?

Lea Draeger: Based on family biographical material, the Economic Popes emerged from my preoccupation with Catholicism and above all with hierarchically shaped societies and family structures. The pope as such is an excellent symbol for a patriarchal figure. My drawings are not portraits of actual and historical popes. They are the faces and figures of popes as institutional bodies in possible and impossible roles and situations – the blessing pope, the Medusa pope, the praying, the evil, the germ pope, the comrade pope, the intestinal spit pope, the Trinity Pope, the sponsors Pope, Oh come little children Pope. I see my papal system as a laboratory. It examines power relations and structures, manipulates their insignia, plays with categories and identities and at the same time undermines them.

In view of the mass of drawings, the idea of ​​economizing seems absurd today. There are now well over 6,000 popes. How has the handling of the works changed over time?

In the beginning it was the “1000 economic popes”. Each pope stands individually as a drawing and has his or her own value, but at the same time, in their plurality, they form set pieces for me that can be combined to create new works. Depending on the place, depending on the space, I arrange popes into different tensions and formations. In their entirety, they also function as an object in space, which, due to their mass, only reveals the individual figures, themes and positions on closer inspection. Only a part of the individual building blocks is visible, many are swallowed up by the violence of the whole. I am also interested in this tension between the finely drawn drawing and the resulting sculpture in its polyphony.

Each drawing has a title, they are called, for example, “Prominence Pope”, “Three Graces Pope”, “Peshmerga Pope” or “Prague Spring Pope”. What role do these additional categories and identities play?

Sometimes the titles match what is shown, sometimes not at all. I am interested in how the perception of the picture changes when the title is added. Since I write them on the back, the image and title are always perceived with a time delay and then put together afterwards. At the same time, I also see the titles as a kind of dialogue. If you hang many popes next to each other, an extensive, intensive dialogue develops over the titles. This dialogue can be increased by the constant addition of new characters, it is both against and with each other speaking.

Forerunners of your drawings are the artist books “Catholic Bus to Lourdes”, “Magdalena’s Old Aunt Maria”, “Jesus in the Nursing Home” and “Mother Magda Martyr”. In January your novel „Wenn ich dich verraten könnte“ [If I could betray you] was published by hanserblau of the Hanser literary publishers. How important is the connection between writing and drawing for you?

 For me, writing and drawing go hand in hand, which is most evident in the artists’ books as they combine drawing and text. In the drawings of the popes, this is reflected, among other things, in the importance of the titles. When placed opposite each other, image and word can undermine their respective level of meaning, but they can also complement and stimulate one another. My writing is very pictorial, my drawings very concrete. My first novel eventually developed from my artist books. It tells a family story spanning three generations, the central theme of which is silence. The granddaughter in the story breaks this silence with words. She confronts her family past, which was shaped by patriarchal violence, and begins to write about it and against it. In fact, up to that point, the grandfather, who was a writer, had written the history of women. For me, writing and drawing are a kind of self-empowerment about myself as a woman and about my story. They are my language.