Camille Auer (b.1984) is no stranger to personal topics. She is a trans-disciplinary artist who works with sound, video and writing. Auer deals with subjects such as structural violence and othering of transgender people. She is also interested in the origin of our experiences of ourselves: why and how they become what they are. Right now she is working on a video about birds and how norms affect the way we produce information.
Originally Camille Auer was doing film studies, but she quickly realized that it was not for her: “I had thought of film as very versatile, there is movement and sound and of course the visual but also textual elements. I had this naive idea that in film I could combine all of these without having to choose, but then the reality of the industry came as a bit of a shock to me.” Because of this, it took Auer a few years after her graduation to get a hold of what she really wanted to do. The artist did her master’s degree in the Visual Culture, Curating and Contemporary Art programme in Aalto University, where she gained the confidence to become an independent artist. “Moving image was a natural choice because of my background in film studies. I realized that all those things that I dreamt of in film as a teenager can be achieved with much more freedom in media art.”
Intimate experience of the body
“I think that using personal experiences in the arts can be very powerful but not very lasting. At least for me it would not be. I can reveal myself, and revealing those deepest wounds can be very powerful but you cannot do it many times. It burns out very efficiently”, the artist explains. Auer dealt with personal topics in her exhibition Antiphallic Dick. The exhibition explored what it is like being a transgender and being perceived as deviating from the norms of society. The works also commented on the power struggles related to bodily autonomy. The exhibition included Auer’s medical records from her trans process organised in the space creating a supposedly neutral but in fact very biased narrative of her life written by the staff of the gender identity research clinics. In one picture, it seems that Auer is cutting her genitalia off. Along with the rest of the exhibition, the picture was “a direct comment on the frustration of the trans process in Finland”, the artist explains.
One side of the exhibition consisted of Auer’s seven-channel installation The Well Kept Secret of Muffing (2017). The video is composed of close up footage of her body from different angles showing all of the body’s hairs and impurities. “It was an idea that I had had for ten years in my head that I wanted to make a video with fragments of my body mixed together. It was a cubistic idea that the body can only be seen from one angle at a time yet still we have an experience of it as a whole. So when all the screens were showing different parts of my body at the same time it was about how different fragments of the body can still be seen as one”, Auer explains.
The exhibition received a lot of publicity and gave Auer’s professional career a kick start drawing more visitors than any of her other exhibitions. However, it was quite hard for her due to the very personal nature of the artworks. Although the artist has worked a lot with topics such as structural violence and the othering of transgender people, she has made a conscious choice to move forward from that topic, because she does not want that to be the only thing she focuses on. The artist talks about not necessarily being comfortable with re-exhibiting Antiphallic Dick: “If I was asked to do the exhibition again now, it would not be at all obvious that I would want to do it again in this world situation. The discourse has moved forward so much, and at the moment I feel like there are other people with more current things to say about it.”
The illusion of normalcy and natural
Auer also examines bodily experience in her video Seepage (2020). It is a video about the outerlines and the surface of the body and how maintaining our bodies, washing and taking care of them, is a constant process, invisible for other people. What is then shown to others is the illusion of a finished process although we all have to work to maintain our public image of what we look like to others, and everybody knows it. Sound plays a big part in the video: the sound of the video is made using two ASMR-microphones, placed at the same distance from each other as human ears, creating an audio experience as if the listener would be present in the space. That way, Auer has been able to bring the viewer as close to the intimate body maintaining process as possible.
Currently Auer is working on a project about ruffs. The idea to do a work about ruffs came to Auer when she was reading an article about these wading birds in a nature magazine. The article described how ruffs have multiple genders and how some male ruffs have female-like features. Auer felt that the article made it seem as if there was something funny about it which felt quite transphobic to the artist. This made her think about how people’s preconceptions are not limited to the human body; If an animal is non normative it receives violent prejudice. The topic has since broadened to be about the formation of knowledge and how birds affect what we know about the world and how we experience our surroundings. Auer also did a sound work about the same topic, presented at ATLAS Arts in Scotland at the end of October. As a part of this larger project, Auer performed in November 2023 a piece called Ruff Knowledge at Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival in Helsinki.
For Camille Auer, the project around ruffs has become more than just work. She has reconnected with her childhood love for birds and become completely infatuated with them.
“Meet the artist” is AV-arkki’s monthly series of interviews with our artists. The interviews are conducted by Vanessa Uhlbäck who was doing an internship in AV-arkki from August to December 2022. Vanessa is completing her Master’s degree in art history at University of Helsinki.