portraits and interviews, generational storytelling, photography as performance, photography and stage design

A photograph that appears in a dark room, breathes for a minute, then vanishes when the lights come up. That’s the tension at the heart of our conversation with photographer and multimedia artist Franzi Kreis, whose practice merges portraiture, sound, stagecraft, and drawing to explore how personal stories become collective memory.

We start with Generation Beta, an evolving archive where daughters speak about their mothers and sons about their fathers. Franzi traces the project back to recordings made as her grandmother’s memory faded, and explains how talking “around” the self reveals the self. From Vienna to Cairo, Sarajevo, Rome, and beyond, the work invites people to place their lives in a wider frame of history, politics, care, and change. The result is intimate and political at once: a humane record of pattern-breaking, continuity, and the choices that shape the next century.

Then the darkroom doors open. In Dunkelkammer for "Die Scham" at Vienna’s Volkstheater, Franzi turns analogue development into live performance. The audience watches an image materialise brushstroke by brushstroke, only for some prints to be sacrificed to light. It’s photography as event rather than artefact, insisting that memory is partial, time-bound, and honest about loss. That same sensibility fuels Tribulaun backdrop, a 13-metre stage design born from a single medium-format negative captured during a fleeting sunrise on the Tribulaun. The story of the chase becomes part of the picture’s meaning, touring with the Herbert Pixner's project From The Dark Side Of The Alps to major concert halls.

We close with Franzi’s return to drawing through a sold-out comic on Pixner’s life, and a look ahead to Buenos Aires, the next destination for creating a new chapter of Generation Beta. If you’re curious about intergenerational storytelling, analogue craft, and performance that gives photographs back their soul, this one’s for you.

Baroque monsters, porcelain sculpture, queer bodies, migrant identities

What If The Holiest Body Is A Monster?

A monster at the altar changes how you see the sacred. We sit down with Vienna-based sculptor Julia Belova to trace how porcelain, silicone, latex, and candy-bright surfaces grow into new bodies that are at once inviting and unsettling. Rooted in a lifelong fascination with Baroque intensity, Julia uses excess, ornament, and movement to question who gets to decide what is holy, desirable, or human. The conversation opens up the architecture of power—religion, patriarchy, and the gaze—and asks how a queer practice can reclaim spectacle without surrendering agency.

Julia brings us inside her largest project to date, Monstrum Sacrum, installed in the historic church Dominikanerkirche in Krems. She explains how the sculptures engage the site and how process videos hung like icon doors, bridge Orthodox memory with a Catholic setting. Scale becomes a statement of existence: a queer, migrant body that takes up space without apology. We talk about masks, visibility, and why hybridity—human, animal, alien—captures the migrant feeling of being seen and mis-seen at once.

Across the hour, we unpack how femininity, sensuality, and fluid gendered energies live in abstraction. Julia resists labels while drawing from the female body’s pleasures and strengths, crafting forms that suggest folds and flowers without pinning them down. The result is a practice that turns beauty into a question: is the sweetest surface a lure or a shield? By reframing Baroque exuberance through a queer lens, Julia finds spirituality not in purity but in honesty—the courage to show all parts, even the monstrous ones, as worthy of reverence.

If this conversation shifts how you see sacred spaces, sculpture, or the bodies we deem acceptable, share it with a friend, leave a review, and subscribe so you never miss our next deep dive.

Sculpture, memory and materiality, street theater as a political act, migrant identities