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Marie Ilse Bourlange, ‘Mother’s Milk’, performed at Looiersgracht60 (2023), photo: LNDWstudio

What do we transmit to the next generation? And can learning about our lineage bring us to a deeper understanding of society at large, or of ourselves? Marie Ilse Bourlanges researched the story of her grandmother who spent thirty years of her life in a psychiatric institution. It resulted in the book Mother’s Milk. Liza Prins asks Bourlanges about intergenerational trauma and the conficts that come with telling someone else’s story.

Just outside the centre of Aix-en-Provence, in the former isolation ward for women of Montperrin hospital, you can find an artistic residency, called 3bisF contemporary art center. It is located thirty kilometers from the psychiatric institution where artist Marie Ilse Bourlanges’ grandmother, Ilse Kratzsch, spent over thirty years of her life. While completing her residency at 3bisF, Bourlanges became increasingly intrigued by her grandmother’s narrative. Together with fellow resident Elena Khurtova, she set up a thorough investigation into the sequence of events that led to Ilse’s diagnosis and institutionalization at the renowned La Timone hospital.

The investigation resulted in the artist’s book Mother’s Milk, an archival fiction* piece that concludes the artistic research project – at least for now. In this publication, Bourlanges explores intergenerational trauma, different healing modalities, motherhood, and the institutionalization of women, as she retraces the story of Ilse as it was passed on to her through various oral histories and snippets of information. Liza Prins speaks to Marie Ilse Bourlanges about Mother’s Milk and the many timely issues raised by her grandmother’s history.

Liza Prins

 Mother’s Milk is the name of your book and of the two works – a performance piece and a video – that were presented at the launch at Looiersgracht 60 (19.1.2023). I find this title intriguing because at first glance it seems unrelated to your grandmother’s life. Could you tell me a bit more about it?

Marie Ilse Bourlanges, 'Mother's Milk', videostill, shown at Looiersgracht60 (2023)

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘For me, everything changed when I became a mother. Suddenly, there was the necessity of giving the best nourishment to my child, or at least attempting to do so. And this fed into questions around transmission: what do you transmit to the next generation? What do you not want to transmit? What do you transmit without willing to do so? These questions were reflected in Ilse’s story, which related to her experience as a mother, but which was also passed on to me by my father and his generation, willingly or unwillingly, without much complexity.’

‘For me, everything changed when I became a mother. Suddenly, there was the necessity of giving the best nourishment to my child, and this fed into questions around transmission: what do you transmit to the next generation?’

Marie Ilse Bourlange, 'Mother's Milk', performed at Looiersgracht60 (2023), photo: LNDWstudio

Marie Ilse Bourlange, 'Mother's Milk', performed at Looiersgracht60 (2023), photo: LNDWstudio

Liza Prins

Rather than in a linear or one-dimensional narrative, you tell the story of Ilse through fragments from interviews and correspondences, archival material, and personal, more poetic episodes. Why is this the way you choose to tell Ilse’s story?

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘For me to answer this question, I would have to discuss the contents of the book. When I started with this project, the only information I had about Ilse was her name, the same name that was later given to me. My father had one picture of her, but almost no other traces. So initially, the only way to access her story was through the accounts of other people, my family members. Their fragmented stories overlapped, but sometimes they contradicted each other. I attempted to convey this problem truthfully since I will never know what really happened. So, I amplified these different voices by including accounts from specialists on psychiatric hospital histories, psychiatrists, archivists, written materials by Ilse and the archival material I found. Then at some point, these different registers, the cacophony of voices, started to occupy my head. It felt overwhelming and quite close to a certain idea of madness that lives in the collective imagination, and that is influenced by pop culture, cinema, etcetera. I used this feeling, as it felt quite truthful to the content.’

Liza Prins

Did you filter or edit the information you found? And how is your research reflected in the design of the book?

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘The content of the book has been edited. The original material of the interviews was in French, as was the archival material. I tried to stay as close as possible to the original intention, intonation, and emotional value of how this information was shared with me.

The book was designed with a lot of love by graphic designer Alix Chauvet. She worked with two complimentary colours that allude to the condition of bipolarity, from which Ilse suffered. The design reflects the many transitional moments of bipolarity, where the copper and turquoise blue merge into beautiful shades. This merging is also reflected in the texts; we developed a system in which either one of the different colours is used for fragments written by me or from other sources, whether interviews or archives. But sometimes, I don’t remember something, and I travel to other sources while writing, so the colours get tangled.

Marie Ilse Bourlange, cover of 'Mother's Milk', photo: The Book Photographer

A second element Alix worked with is a specific ornament we encountered in the residency of 3bisF, which has kept the original architecture of the pavilion from the 1900s. The doors of the isolation cells were decorated with tiles with patterns of squares in other squares that look like a symbol for the people isolated in their own little squares or cell. Throughout the book, this ornamental square first appears on the pages as a recognizable sign, a constructed ornament, and then gradually it becomes more like a shredded piece of paper until it dissolves into dust particles.’

‘The design reflects the many transitional moments of bipolarity, where the copper and turquoise blue merge into beautiful shades’

Marie Ilse Bourlange, spread from 'Mother's Milk', photo: The Book Photographer

Marie Ilse Bourlange, spread from 'Mother's Milk', photo: The Book Photographer

Liza Prins

You frequently discuss the concept of psycho-genealogy. How does this relate to your research and the development of the book?

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘When I first started to tap into Ilse’s story, it was a personal, slightly frightening quest. But over time, I began to look at it more from a researcher’s perspective; I learned about psycho-genealogy, a concept in psychology that presumes that different types of trauma can be transmitted through generations. Learning about psycho-genealogy gave me a sense of agency while digging into the unfolding life story of Ilse, mapping the constellations of interactions and navigating or neutralizing its traumatic aspects.’

Liza Prins

During the launch of the book, your editor, Marta Pagliuca Pelacani, brought up something interesting about how traumatic memory is stored. She explained that although we remember most experiences in life in a narrative structure, as a story, traumatic experiences are rendered as images without any comprehensive storyline. Drawing on this knowledge, I wonder if by allowing Ilse’s story to emerge fully, you might create space to forget it, not by pushing it into oblivion but by storing it as a complete and complexified narrative.

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘Yes, when I was younger and had difficult periods, there was just this one-dimensional idea of what mental illness was and how the illness of my father’s mother somehow predicated it. My father’s childhood memories of his mother were either coloured by her mania or of her as a docile, medicated patient. This must have been quite traumatic, and he transmitted those images to me. Now I understand what happened to her was highly specific to her circumstances and disposition. Seeing Ilse as a story full of complexities and no longer as a looming image of a slightly scary, ill woman does help to let it go.

There was a beautiful moment when I found Ilse’s letters to her lover. There is so much beauty there, she’s reading poetry and translating them for him from German. Discovering other aspects of this woman with sensitivity and humor, and her being in love made her much more approachable, and I felt a connection.’

Liza Prins

Would you say this research helped you work through this intergenerational trauma, on a personal and more general level?

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘I hope so. I aimed to destigmatize both the condition and the idea of madness, and the psychiatric hospital in itself. For me to do that, it was important to bring that complexity, the noises and different perspectives of people that usually remain unheard – of patients or hospital staff, or of the archive itself – to the forefront.’

Liza Prins

Although Mother’s Milk presents a personal story, it also shows glimpses of shared narratives of the diagnosing and institutionalization of women, and of inter-generational suffering within the hyper-specificity of Ilse’s life. Was it challenging to deal with your relationship with your grandmother while also positioning her life story as a gateway to a more general, feminist discussion of the historical institutionalization of women?

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘When I started the project, I went to the Departmental Archive of the Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille and was immediately told that Ilse’s file must have already been destroyed. Due to legal changes in 2006 and to save archival storage space, files were destroyed ten years after a patient’s death. Before that ‘reform’, psychiatric medical files were meant to be kept forever. This was an interesting start after the gaps and destructions I had already encountered in the personal stories of my family members due to their discomfort. Now that destruction was amplified by the protocol of institutional sites.

This was the first time that personal and general narratives met, and I started to follow the companies that were commissioned by hospitals to destroy medical archives. There’s a specific protocol for this, as personal data and privacy have to be protected. There is something quite sad about the disposing of these files as they hold potential answers to many questions. I got authorization to film this destruction and the cleaning of other documents, boring financial administrative documents, which apparently were considered worthy of keeping. This painful realization, that medical information of already marginalized people was not considered worth saving or remembering, was conveyed through these videos.

Marie Ilse Bourlange, 'Mother's Milk', performed at Looiersgracht60 (2023), photo: LNDWstudio

Since I was looking for the story of Ilse, who was hospitalized among other women, the gravity of the oblivion of women with a psychological diagnosis became very tangible. And then there were also many questions about why they were institutionalized in the first place and how specific treatments were more frequently prescribed to women than men, such as ECT/electroconvulsive therapy, cold and hot bathing, etcetera.’

‘Since I was looking for the story of Ilse, who was hospitalized among other women, the gravity of the oblivion of women with a psychological diagnosis became very tangible’

Elena Khurtova & Marie Ilse Bourlanges, 'Displace', 2020, exhibition view at Centre d'art 3bisF. Photo: Jean-Christophe Lett

Elena Khurtova & Marie Ilse Bourlanges, 'Displace', 2020, exhibition view at Centre d'art 3bisF. Photo: Jean-Christophe Lett

Liza Prins

This we can read in the story of Ilse as well. The multiple accounts of her diagnosis are almost as diverse as the number of voices in the book. There are thoughts on feminized forms of diagnosis, the likelihood for women to get diagnosed, and some speculation about the role of her German background.

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘My father was convinced that Ilse was incorrectly diagnosed and put away in La Timone because she was German, and after the war, there was still a lot of resentment in France. But after reading the beautiful letters Ilse had written to her lover, I think maybe she was always a little bit dreamy.

I also think, however, her diagnosis was inherent to her condition as a woman, which brought her to a psychotic episode. The accounts of her life reveal several possible circumstances that may have caused this, but one thing stands out: it is possible she may have fled Germany because she had an abortion. Before the war, the Nazi regime placed increasingly severe restrictions on abortion, including prison sentencing. During the war, when ideas about eugenics intensified in Nazi Germany and Vichy France, special courts were authorized to impose the death penalty for anyone providing an abortion. This measure only concerned women of the so-called Aryan type. As I did this research between 2020 and 2022, Roe vs. Wade was overturned in the US (on 24 June 2022), making women’s reproductive rights and Ilse’s escape from Germany suddenly – and unfortunately – very relevant.’

Liza Prins

In the book, you write that your daughter Zoe argued that maybe your grandmother might not want her story to be retold, that perhaps she wanted it to remain a secret. You also bring up the right to be forgotten in a legal sense, referring to an individual’s right of not having their data forever archived on the internet.

In Mother’s Milk, you navigate between Ilse’s right to be forgotten and your right to know her story. Could you tell me more about these conflicting needs?

Marie Ilse Bourlanges

 ‘In choosing to write and publish this book, I decide that Ilse’s story will be disclosed, albeit in a fragmented way. The conflicting needs or rights are also why the book gives so many possible versions of her life story. The book also provides an extra layer to the destruction that happened in the archives. When I learned about this, I was initially saddened by the obliteration of memories, but many archivists and other people in the archive world told me that it was important to destroy these files, as it is also a way not to stigmatize a person based on their medical file. If the existence of Ilse had left more tangible marks and if I would have gotten a hold of her medical file, then she might have been forever remembered as just a psychiatric patient.’

Click here for more information on Marie Ilse Bourlanges’ book Mother’s Milk

 

* The term ‘archival fiction’ was developed in collaboration with the editor of Mother’s Milk, Marta Pagliuca Pelacani

Liza Prins

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