QUESTION: Can you tell me something about your video-installation ‘Orgasmic Faces’—why do you record people’s faces experiencing orgasms?

ANSWER: I think it is very different from pornography or erotic art because as a viewer you are kept outside of the ecstatic experiences the people are going through. I also work with a sound track of snails making sounds as they are coming back to live after they were deprived of water.

QUESTION: And then you make performances and installations based on medieval mysticism?

ANSWER: I have been interested in mysticism for a long time. In the 11th Century there was a Beweging Van de Vrije Geest ( Movement of the Free Ghost) where a lot of men stopped acknowledging the concept of original sin. They suddenly were allowed to fuck and to travel, and it became a very powerful movement. I think it was a bit like the Flower Power movement in the 1960s. The movement has been completely eradicated from history, as the 11th century saw a complete revival of Catholicism, as well as other sects. What came out was this movement was the ‘Beguine’ women’s movements in Belgium, although of course some of the women were also burned at the stake. They were not witches but mystics, and some explored free love and explored the free spirit with their bodies. And then they started to ask themselves ‘What is god?’ and ‘How can I reach god?’ They were trying to have a direct line of communication with god without having sacraments or without consulting priests. They would start fasting and start flagellating themselves in order to obtain this a state of ecstatic union. I started to explore ecstasy myself through embroidery, I decided to do embroidery for fourteen hours a day. The other hours I made love to my boyfriend. I used to make love seven times a day.

QUESTION: How did you get interested in embroidery?

ANSWER: I was embroidering a funeral dress for a baby, as part of my installation ‘Fuck me dead'.

QUESTION: Did you try to recreate the effect of what you did when you were embroidering?

ANSWER: Yes, I want to focus on the experience rather than see this embroidery as a product. I took one thousand macroscopic slides of the cloth using a special diamant light that produces a strange effect on the stitches, and I projected different slides in different times on each other so that the pattern seems to be alive.

It is amazing how you can start seeing the world if you look up from the work. It is complete chaos, like what I you see on the dress. In my installation ‘Fuck Me Dead” I present the macroscopic images of the stitches. I also show the making of the embroidery in a video-narrative. Then, in a second dark room, I show the actual dress. The video portrays a doll that is in ecstasy and walking on a path of glass. She looks at the snails and picks one up and breaks its shell. Then it starts raining milk from the sky and she cries white tears. Then there are rotten fish coming out of the water. They don’t recognize the boundaries between water and air. And the entire landscape is on fire. The branches of the tree are on fire, but the trunks remain untouched (like in the forests that are set on fire in Australian landscapes.) And then the doll is buried.

This is like forever dying and forever living, and that represents my experience of ecstasy. I stopped eating and sleeping when I was embroidering, and started to have visions. I started to experience unusual physical effects. For example when I pricked my finger with a needle, causing an electric shock.