Rome, 15 December 2025
Dear Chantal,
I’ve always been writing letters ever since I was very young. Perhaps as a way of making myself heard without being interrupted and saying what I wanted without being constrained by the responses or non-verbal cues on the other end. Letters to my mother, my friends, my sweethearts (platonic or real), my grandfather, strangers, myself. Everything can be said in a letter.
Your first feature film, Je, tu, il, elle (1974), which was later transformed into an installation, is a starting point for me and a guide for what I want to tell you.
JE/I. Twenty-five years separate us. Different circumstances, different contexts, but a common thread: mothers affected by a childhood trauma, by a story they did not choose to live but has nonetheless permeated us. Perhaps that is why the installations featuring your mother are the ones that affect me the most, the ones that resonate with me in a more direct and physical manner.
When you turned twenty-five and gave the world Jeanne Dielman, I was opening my eyes. She was peeling potatoes in her Brussels kitchen while my mother was breastfeeding me in Badajoz. She was assassinating the patriarchy while our dictator was dying of old age, exhausting the dictatorship.
The 1970s in Spain were turbulent times, with a yearning for the end and the final gasps of a regime that should never have been imposed. Jeanne Dielman wasn’t released in this country then. It wasn’t until 2023 that it was screened commercially, following the commotion caused by Sight and Sound selecting it as the best film of the century in 2022. It would have been profoundly symbolic if it had premiered as part of the birth of our democracy: the household angel assassinating the system and, in doing so, ending the patriarchy.
That same year, Martha Rosler also ended the system in her own ironic manner, although similarly in a violent way in the kitchen. The following year, Suzanne Lacy recreated the scene by cutting up a lamb. Woman and kitchen. You took both out of the home and carried them into the cinema, and later into the museum.
Those who haven’t seen Jeanne on screen probably won’t be able to understand what is happening on those seven monitors showing an almost static image of a woman with bloodstains on her hands sitting at the dining room table breathing, thinking, accepting. Perhaps understanding it isn’t necessary. Seven monitors insisting on a seemingly innocuous moment, yet one with which a connection is inevitably established. Remaining there. Going through that moment again and again. Experiencing it up to seven times.
In Je, tu, il, elle, l’installation (2007), you transform the temporal sequence of the 1974 film into a spatial structure. Three screens for three black-and-white situations. You alone, writing and eating sugar. You with the red-haired man: no shot-reverse-shot, both side by side. He speaks; you listen. You’re not asking him anything; you’re not revealing anything about yourself. Perhaps there is attraction, but nothing more. He talks about his wife, his married life, boredom. All with the same detachment. Silence falls, the muteness of the female experience on screen, something that would acquire a specific weight in Jeanne Dielman the following year. And you with her: there is indeed passion there, laughter, naked bodies making love in broad daylight. You move from one screen to another in three different registers of your intimacy. And once again, the spatial loop acts as a mirror once again. Remaining there.
TU/YOU. You are the women who are smoking in Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre (2008), the silent installation in which silence is not broken by words, but rather by gestures of waiting and smoke. Five screens on the side wall, which you call “landscape”, and one on the front wall with an extreme close-up of a smoking face in black and white, which you call “portrait”. All of them smoking, like you. All of them waiting, like you. That silent choreography does not narrate; it presents lives outside the frame.
Claire, your friend and editor since 1995, whom I met at the opening of Chantal Akerman: Facing the Image. Tall, a sharp gaze, eager to talk and listen, she told me something that has stayed with me: that your work wasn’t a concept to be explained, but a body to be explored. That before naming, one had to allow the images to manifest themselves. That the story isn’t imposed during editing, but rather listened to so that it can emerge. She told me that there was no fixed plan during your editing processes. The two of you at your house: she would be working; you would be cooking. The conversation would begin with her suggestion. The same was true of the installations: no one else was needed, just the two of you, the film footage and the exhibition space. Any doubts were resolved with your “we shall see”.
Babette, another friend and collaborator, also speaks of you from a similar place of shared creation. Although I haven’t been able to speak to her, she wrote a piece about you in 2016 that revealed some important things for me. You met in New York in late 1971, when you were twenty-one and she was twenty-nine. You both came from the margins of an industry that excluded you both. Babette didn’t need you to explain to her why your relationship with a cameraman hadn’t worked out: she had experienced the same male exclusion. You both shared the conviction that you had to find your own language to make films that contemplated the world in which you both lived, without the dominant references of traditional cinema. This experience cemented a friendship that lasted beyond your time in New York. She knew you well. I really like it when she says that your transition to installation wasn’t a change of medium, but rather a logical shift: you wanted the image to occupy real space, viewers to be able to move between shots and durations, the editing to happen not only in time, but also in the body. In her words, she considers you a pioneer in transforming your films into installations.
And Mina Loy, whom I’m forcing into this constellation because even though she wasn’t part of your circle, she is part of mine at this moment, as I’m writing this letter. I met her thanks to my friend Mónica, and Beatriz later told me that she wrote about her and her poems in her thesis. Mina brought me to Rome. Even though you never met, I think there would have been a fruitful dialogue between the two of you. She also sought another way of saying things: writing that broke with established norms, dismantled literary and social codes from within, demanded the emancipation of the body and language.
She arrived in New York with the same fervour with which you arrived decades later: hungry for modernity, yearning for an artistic community, and perhaps also with the intuition that the world and identity could be rethought from there. The daughter of a Jewish father, she also bore the weight of a history that defined her foreignness, her difference and her resistance. She was excluded from Futurist circles, which initially celebrated her work and then forget her; she broke with that movement when she realised its inherent misogyny, and from that rupture she wrote a new feminist perspective from which to speak.
Had you met, I like to think that you would have recognised something in each other: a desire to emancipate the female experience from the dominant narrative framework, a refusal to be defined by men and their stories, a will to transform one’s own life into an artistic method. Mina was seeking in language what you were seeking in images: another syntax, another breath.
As in Femmes d’Anvers en Novembre, where the night-time landscape and continuous gesture of inhaling and exhaling are meaningless, these women do not represent ideas, but rather inexplicable presences that nonetheless permeated us.
IL/HE. Time and absence run throughout your work as a whole, but in this exhibition they are concentrated with particular intensity in Marcher à côté de ses lacets dans un frigidaire vide (2004), an installation in which three generations appear superimposed. Your grandmother is and is not present: her presence is conveyed through her handwriting, which is projected onto a tulle screen. The tulle resonates in the shot of Anna, your alter ego in Les rendez-vous de Anna, as she draws back the curtain, and it connects with the tactile quality of the image and the delicacy of a veil that filters your conversation with your mother. At that moment, it is possible to look only at the living women, projected onto the back wall, observing you from the bench opposite her to remain in that conversation of yours, in that encounter with your forgotten mother tongue.
That installation was for me the heart of the exhibition.
Installation as a new form of editing. Not simply translating film into space, but rather reformulating images so that they take shape. Returning to the film, isolating certain shots, enlarging them to allow the viewer to move through them. As Claire said, there is a touch of play about it, but also that of process. The editing ceases to be temporal and acquires a spatial dimension, and that displacement changes the position of the body that looks.
While I was there, I wondered if your mother had ever walked through any of your installations. If she had ever seen you projected in that space, heard your images answering the many questions she asked you in her letters. I don’t know. But in Marcher à côté…, the relationship between the tulle, your grandmother’s writing and your suspended conversation creates something that is not representation, but rather contact. I spent more time in that room than in any other. Not because I understood more, but because something compelled me to do so. A form of sustained attention that had to do with touch and affection, not just the traumatic history of living and loss at Auschwitz.
I’m writing to you from a ship crossing the Mediterranean. I’m on my way to Rome, which acts like a vital journey for me now, almost an intimate equivalent of your New York. A time of transit. The background music is neutral, almost decorative. Midway through the voyage, a loudspeaker announces an emergency drill. The voice is solemn, even dramatic. We’re told that we must participate, that it’s mandatory. Nothing happens. The smokers continue smoking. No one gets up; no one leaves his or her table; no one looks for the meeting point. The sound goes one way and the bodies go another.
I think of D’Est, of that view on the everyday lives of people waiting for change without knowing it. The fall of the Berlin Wall had not yet altered their gestures at all. Time still weighed the same. This suspended, dense time also appears time and time again in your work. Not as a metaphor, but as a condition.
ELLE/SHE. The mother permeates this exhibition like a constant presence. Not only as a biographical figure, but also as an emotional construct. In My Mother Laughs, Prelude, you read the opening pages of the book you wrote while she was ill. There is no dramatization. There is no distance. Your voice fills the room and transforms the writing into a physical act.
I then think of your insistence on writing and that phrase of yours: “If you want to make a film, you have to write.” Not as a preliminary step, but as a way of thinking. You invented your own way of doing things without an academy, constructing your own language.
Later, you said: “Now I’m alone, and it’s forever.” Not as a lament, but as an acknowledgement. The death of a mother leaves a loneliness that is not overcome, only reorganised.
I’m reminded now of Moyra Davey and her Hemlock Forest, in which she writes about the same experience of death, but from a different perspective, and once again I find you there. Writing as a form of mourning. And once again I recall Beatriz, who first introduced me to Moyra’s work, as if female genealogies were intertwining.
Your own space was precisely that: the one you invented. From very early on, your work was read and contemplated from contemporary art. October, Artforum, Laura Mulvey writing about you. Decades later, Sight and Sound placed Jeanne Dielman at the centre of the canon. Your work circulates between film, museums and galleries, belonging rightfully to all of them.
This letter is simply an excuse to spend some time with you; it doesn’t seek an impossible answer. It serves to remind me of my visit to your exhibition. What I felt. What resonated. It’s a way of remaining. From there, the encounter is neither biographical nor nostalgic. It’s a situated, embodied experience that compels us to think about how a form is created, displayed and experienced.
Looking forward to meeting you again.
Hugs,
Cristina