Artists: Hanna Mattes - Eva Mattes

At Home in India in Brandenburg
by Marija Grujić

A magical-realist interview with Eva & Hanna — where a house called “India” turns into a compass. Horizons and sweet-wrapper foils, grief and play, loud and quiet sides: art letting distance feel like home.

On a rooftop in Berlin, Eva and Hanna — mother and daughter — speak of a house in Brandenburg called “India.” It is not India; it is here. Horizons captured day after day on the Pacific meet a shimmering curtain of praline foils. “If I put the cup here and say it is art, then it is art,” Hanna insists, and the house seems to nod. Their words oscillate — loud / quiet, grief / joy, domestic / monumental — until the imagined praline is unwrapped, comma by comma, each glittering paper a window. Eva says — dušo moja; I hear my grandmother’s refrain srce moje—and the house called India becomes a compass: for inheritance, for love, for the fragile line where water turns to air.

Eva Mattes
Born in Tegernsee in 1954, to the Budapestian actress and dancer Margit Symo, and the Viennese composer and conductor Willy Mattes, the stage announced Eva Mattes while only twelve, with film swiftly ensuing. Since 1966, Eva has led and supported two hundred characters in feature film, televised film and theatrical production, with R. W. Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Michael Verhoeven and Peter Zadek among her directors. A foremost figure within New German Cinema, her performances are honoured and awarded by the Bavarian Film Awards, the Cannes Film Festival and the German Film Awards.

Hanna Mattes
Born in Munich in 1980 to the Austro-German actress Eva Mattes and the Bavarian filmmaker Werner Herzog, Hanna Mattes’ introduction to narrative was distinct and advanced. Narrative was not only entertainment but a tool with which to transform and to understand. Through analogue photography, text and sound, Hanna explores narrative storytelling and its power in shaping perception and meaning. Unfolding at the intersection of fiction and reality, there is strong focus on ecology and the Anthropocene - landscapes, memories and mythologies as spaces where human and more-than-human worlds meet.