Vienna Time

Interview with Franzi Kreis

• Liudmila Kirsanova • Season 3 • Episode 2

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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.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Hi, it's Vienna Time with Liudmila Kirsanova. For my podcast, I interview artists who live and work in Vienna, a place both grandly old and vivaciously young. Whether my guests were born here, chose, or happen to be here, I'm keen on giving voices and sharing stories of very different artists belonging with different traditions and generations. I do gravitate towards profound interviews rather than sketches and brief questionnaires, and that's why you'll find here in-depth talks embracing both professional and personal insights. Considering my curatorial practice, I've been meeting extraordinary artists and witnessing wonderful art projects that no doubt will go down the history. And now I'm eager to share it with you to give an inside look at the local art scene which is as vibrant and diverse as personalities creating it. Let's explore and celebrate it together. And today my guest is Franzi Kreis. Hallo Franzi.

Franzi Kreis:

Hallo Ludmilla.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Franzi is a photographer, a photo artist better say, who also works with sound and film. Her body of work is very much focused on storytelling, especially what concerns personal stories, life stories. Combining pictures together with interviews in her big ongoing project Generation Beta, she pursues both intimate, almost vulnerable, and at the same time deeply inspiring and empowering portraiture. Again, in Generation Better, she shows us how personal and political, individual and historical are inevitably interwoven and interconnected. But today you are in a position where maybe you usually have your guests because you usually ask questions and they open up for you about their lives and very personal things. So today we exchange the roles a bit and you become uh on the other side of the interview. Are you ready for this role today?

Franzi Kreis:

I'm super excited because usually it has a reason why you pick the back side of the camera, and that's why you don't want to be in front of the camera or in front of the microphone. But yeah, let's go.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Let's start with this huge project that you are doing, the project in development, which is called Generation Better, because it's a project, maybe by which you are very much known not only in Vienna, but also abroad. And for this project, you interview daughters about their mothers and you interview song about their fathers. So you take portraits and then you have recorded stories, and then the portraits come together with stories. And maybe my very first question would be why did you title your project Generation Better? Because what is it? It's about the generation that comes after Generation Alphas who are expected to see the rise of the 22nd century. This is the generation better.

Franzi Kreis:

So generation better is a lot about the past, but actually it's about the future and the questions: why do we look into the past? Maybe because it tells us something about the future. It's about breaking patterns, breaking with patterns, or maybe also continuing patterns that are good ones. And uh the start of the project was actually finding motherland. So that was the previous version of Generation Better. It's a project about daughters telling their mothers' biographies. I started this project eight years ago, actually with my own family. It uh it began when my grandmother started to forget a lot of things, so I had this feeling of I need to record some of her memories. But in the same moment, I had this feeling that if I address her with questions about her own life decisions, I don't think she would tell me so many things about herself because she's this kind of a woman raised being a young woman in the 1950s, never putting herself in the center. So I had this idea, I will ask her about her mother and her grandmother because about her, also my mother could tell me a lot. This was one of the best conversations I ever had with my grandmother because by telling me her mother's and her grandmother's life, she also told me a lot about herself and a lot about the history of that time. After this moment, I had conversations with very different women, born in very different situations, born in very different centuries. And what was interesting for me as an artist is that the topic always at some point occurs. So it as a woman you're at some point always in touch with your mother's biography if you want, or if you don't want. And so I had this idea of starting a worldwide archive that is a never-ending story. So I would say it's a life project of collecting stories of very different women. And shortly after there came the project Father Earth, which uh was a project about men and their father's biographies, and now the project is called Generation Better because it's I thought it would be really interesting to have a look at the question: how do we get out of a generational circle? How do we really step into our own life by valuing our past, but by really taking our own decisions?

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Do you mean that with this project you address a generation to come, that you want to send them a message, that you want to communicate certain ideas? Because by naming, you're kind of aiming, right, to speak to them, to people who are to be born, right? So you want to communicate with them the past, our present, but their past. So it's like a message into the future.

Franzi Kreis:

Maybe, yeah, if if it's a message in the future, it's fine. For me, it's also like an experiment of collecting perspectives.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Also in uh the description of the project, you also mention the political meaningfulness of telling a story. By telling you their personal story, they are sort of inscribing themselves into the broader history. And while doing those interviews, did you feel this moment of empowerment that the person telling their own story feels meaningful, feels a part of a big history? Did you feel this empowerment?

Franzi Kreis:

I think it's a lot of about dialogue, about feeling each other. So for me as an artist, the most beautiful moment that can happen is if someone visiting the exhibition, taking the earphone, diving into the story. If this person experiences a similar moment than I experienced by listening to someone's story face to face, then I would say the project aim is fulfilled. What is really amazing is this project is about connection and there is a connection between all of us. On the one hand, it's a very universal language, this topic about mothers and daughters. But when I started the project in Vienna, let's say it was a lot about how do I not become like my mother? No, I'm joking, but uh and when I went to Cairo last year, it was really amazing because there is such a huge solidarity between women in general and between mothers and daughters in Egypt. So I received around five emails, and the the idea was to do five new interviews with women, but they uh all of these women also invited their mothers to the project to talk about the grandmothers. So I had in the end 10 interviews and also moving portraits of mothers and daughters together. This was the first time it happened, and the project so far was in 2020 in Moscow, in Sarajevo afterwards, then in Bern, Rome, Calabria, Budapest, Novagorica. So this was really special. I think the project mostly works because it's um it's a very personal project of mine, and I did this work in the beginning in my own family. So then it started with friends. It's not a really like in the beginning, it was starting first, it was family, then it was friends, then it was friend of friends. Now I'm doing I'm doing an open call meeting people for the first time when I do this interview, but still it has this very, very personal moment, and I would say that this is the base of the interviews.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

You do storytelling also in your other project, which is called Dunkelkammer, for which you uh collaborate with Volkstheater. Can you please tell me more about this project?

Franzi Kreis:

So in 2022, I got a very interesting request from Vienna Volkstheater if I could create a stage design for Arni Ernaud Shame, which is a piece that, as most texts of Annie Arnaud, are about biographic memories, about a documentary approach to a very personal story. So this book is mostly about Annie Arnaud's childhood and a traumatic moment when her father tried to kill her mother, but it didn't happen in the end. But uh little Annie Arno sees this moment happening and it influences her whole life. But then the text makes a switch, and it's actually not so much about this traumatic experience, but she's unfolding the whole society in which she has grown up. And what I proposed was to take photos of a 10-year-old girl as if it was France in the 1950s with the dresses, with the hair, with the with everything. And I took the photos with an analogue camera, a medium format camera, a yellow husband, which is an amazing camera, and I have those negatives, and what I do is to enlarge those negatives in the show. So the whole audience is sitting in a dark room, um, the whole audience is sitting in red light and watches me enlarging those photos. So usually you know photo paper which is put in a bath and then the picture appears. And what I did is I reconstructed the whole thing. So it's all in a vertical line. It's the first time that this was done in a theater, and I'm developing with a brush, which gives me endless possibilities to play with the photos. So and there is the historic projector, the enlarger, and and I I put the chemical, the chemical is on the brush, and the brush is on the paper, and then you see an eye appearing, then you see the mouth appearing, then it's running down. And every show is different. And we played 47 sold-out shows, which was incredible, and was what was also incredible that it gave me a huge artistic push to have this stage adrenaline. I remember the premiere, I was super nervous. I thought I would collapse or something. And at the moment when I was on the stage, something it's maybe how how musicians also describe when they step on stage, they are not nervous anymore when they start playing the instrument. And this was maybe a similar moment that I got really calm, and after the 10th show, I even I I could even look into the audience, which was another very interesting point because at some point I saw an 80-year-old woman remembering the 1950s, not in France, but in Austria, and though and these emotions started to go into the pictures. So um that was an amazing project, and one picture is now going to the Museum de Moderna in Salzburg.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Great.

Franzi Kreis:

And yeah.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And so, but it's uh very interesting. So you turn this, let's say, photography kitchen, which is usually stayed for us, the viewers, closed. You kind of invite us to this dark room to see how the picture is born, right? Because it's appearing in front of our eyes. And it's actually a very interesting gesture because usually we observe a picture as something final, right? As something that represents moment, but then you turn for us it into a process. And that means that every time all the pictures from each performance they're all different because you cannot repeat, of course. Unfortunately, I didn't see the performance with my own eyes, uh, but I saw the documentation and this face of a girl. It's really somehow, even from a documentation, I had this feeling that we have an eye contact. I don't know. Somehow, in these pictures that you uh that you are doing with this performance, you achieve this uh not like a stable image, like a ready photography, but something like pulsing through some like because of this maybe vibrant of strokes of your brush, the image is breathing, it's kind of leaving. And then you do shows with these pictures, right? So then uh we can go and see the pictures in the space.

Franzi Kreis:

Yes, there was a show in Lukasfeichner gallery, and it's always the a few pictures that survived the show because what happens in the end of the show that I is that I turn on the light and the pictures I didn't, let's say, fix, they disappear into the black. And what is maybe interesting is I did another project which is called Tribolone, and it really it it followed this project because it's the same technique and it's also a stage design. And it's a stage design that has been developed live, but is touring now on a printed canvas which is 13 meters long. And it's a stage design for Herbert Pixner project, the dark side of the Alps. He's touring the stage design now for the second year, so it's probably more than 120 concerts until now, and very big venues like Gusfestspielhaus Salzburg, Wiener Concerthouse, Berlin, Munich, Issa Philharmonie, and those spaces. And what I developed for Herbert Pixner is a huge mountain. A mountain that is connected to his own childhood. So he said, like, oh, I would really wish to have the Trivolun. Is the mountain that uh separates Austria from Italy. Uh South Tyrol. So he's Italian. And please, please do Tribolone in winter. And in winter it's really you can hardly climb Tribolone because he's uh this mountain is actually falling apart. And I went to South Tyrol for a weekend in winter, observing the weather for weeks before. And when we did um my partner was with me carrying the camera. I'm a lucky person. So going up the first time, there was a beautiful panorama, and only the Tribolone was in clouds. So going down again, going up again the other morning, same thing. Mountain panorama, Tribolown in clouds. So there was only one possibility to get it, and it was Monday morning starting at four in the morning to get the sunrise. So it was it had minus nine degrees, and we put on the spikes on the shoes and and and started to walk up the the mountain that is on the other side where you can have this where you where you see the Trivolon, and and we were really telling each other like no, we we shouldn't go up there in a rush because then we will be all sweaty and have to uh change our stuff when we are up. But nevertheless, we ran up the mountain because we were we were really afraid to miss the magic moment. And then you captured it. And then we captured it, but first we had to change our clothes because we were completely sweaty when we were up the mountain. And in the very moment when I had my jacket on, again there was like one golden ray of sun hitting the top of Tribolon, and the little cloud was blown away, and then it was a few seconds, and then it was gone. The magic moment was gone. So I was taking photos, photos, photos again with this analog median medium format camera. And this negative was the base for this 13-meter stage design. Then we made a atelier evening where Herbert Pixner traveled to Vienna and I developed it again in front of an audience because it would be the backdrop of a live show, so why not doing it live because it has a certain tension in it? And then the light is switched on, and because I only worked with the developer fluid, but not with the other fluids, it's turning black. And then we had a reproduction camera that is like capturing every moment of the let's say, of this uh destruction process, and then it's like one moment of the destruction process that is now on the big canvas.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Franzi, you know, now talking to you and listening to your amazing stories, I'm realizing that you are a photographer who is transforming photography into a performance. You're really turning this idea of photography as a captured moment, kind of still, into a performative act, which is extremely interesting. Because of course, in our time when we are overflown and overwhelmed with pictures, of course, I'm very mature that photography as a medium asks much questions about what is photography now in contemporary art when we are constantly, all of us are making thousands of pictures on a daily basis. And I think this is a brilliant way you are finding really to turn it away from this fixed procedure and evolve it into performance. So you're telling us, your viewers, that photography is much more than an object. That's really that's really wonderful.

Franzi Kreis:

Thank you. That's really nice if uh if it works out to make photography into something that is not forever, this is what I wish to do. Because this was also the idea, if I put photography on a stage, I don't wanna put photography for like uh eternity. What was my very first idea when I was asked for the stage design in Volkstheater was if I put photography on stage, then I want to work about disappearing. In photography, it's often about capturing something. To have it forever. And I want to do the opposite with this project because memory is fragmented, memory changes. And I do an interview about a biography, and I do and I will ask you the same questions again in 10 years, it will be another interview. So this is what makes it interesting. Absolutely.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

And also now you make me think about how amazingly you reflect the idea of time in your body of work. Because of course, photography is very much about time. Like you're now taught about the mountain. It's always like that moment, right? It's always about this particular moment that that is. But then in your performances, in your stories for all your projects, Dunkel Kammer and Generation Beta and Triboulang, you show us that it's like this series of moments that you're kind of, and then I really also love that you're not afraid of your pictures to disappear. Because also it's kind of about when you switch on the light, right? Some of them turn black. So it's kind of you also treasure moments that are not preserved for the eternity.

Franzi Kreis:

That's true, yeah. Um maybe, but it's also now interesting talking about all those photo projects and the analog project for Herbert Pixner, is that all those works brought me back to something I do since I was a child, and this is drawing. So I'm drawing since I can hold a pen. And this year my first comic was published in September. Now uh it's already sold out and it's beginning of November, which is kind of magic. And it's about the life story of Herbert Pixner, and when the backdrop accompanied the concert in Wiener Concerthouse last year, we were having a drink and we walked out for a cigarette, and Herbert asked me, So Franci, what's next? And I was like, I will do a comic about you. And he was like, Okay. So we we did a handshake and that was it, and then I started with sketches, and now um it was a project in less than a year, and it's a book about 144 pages. So it was my whole summer I spent drawing, and it's about a life story. So it was for me, it was really a fulfilling moment to have this long way of dealing with photography, becoming a photographer, deconstructing photography by doing it in a painty way, and now coming back to what I actually do since I was very little and this is drawing.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Any project we take of yours, there is always this idea of telling a life story, of telling a certain story of a personal story. And maybe you did answer a bit uh this question when we just started talking, but can you tell me this artistically? Why are you drawn to personal stories? Why are you drawn to this idea of personal story? And whatever you do, whether it's a comic book or it's a project with a theater or it's a photography project, we see this idea of personal story developing.

Franzi Kreis:

What is really interesting is how many big political questions, questions of contemporary history of society are embedded in life stories. This is probably what draws me to it, but maybe it's also a very personal decision or how we say out of the stomach aus dem Bauch heraus what we are drawn to. So I remember when I was maybe ten years old, I was asking my great-grandmother questions and having a little notebook and writing everything down and then thinking about the questions and what was not answered, and there were many things not answered. So I I discovered very soon that telling a story or telling also about the past is a lot about the gaps in between. Then I would go back to my great-grandmother asking about the gaps in between, and then not being happy with what she told me about the gaps in between, because there were still gaps in between. So this is what I remember when I was 10 years old.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

So this kind of gaps and then how you can see this big history shining through personal histories, right? And I know that now you're traveling soon uh to Argentina. So it's also for you always uh diving into new cultures and showing your projects. Uh and may I ask uh what kind of feedback do you get?

Franzi Kreis:

There is a lot of feedback, and also I have a lot of contact with the people I interviewed. Also, the story I publish, I do it in very close communication with my, let's say, protagonists. So when I do a catalogue, I will send it to them and if they wanna put in another sentence, because so this is a very close process. And in January, there will be a super special Ateli evening because Nada, who is on the cover of my Cairo catalogue, she's also a photo, a photo artist, and she will be traveling to Vienna, spending the whole January in Vienna for a little residency, and we will do a project together. So, this is what I'm really excited about after returning from Buenos Aires.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Yeah, that sounds really exciting that you also find your future uh creative partners through your projects. By the way, what was the feedback about the comic story? I mean, you're already told that it was sold out, but from the main hero, how did he see his own life portrayed by you?

Franzi Kreis:

That was very special because it was a very trustful process, so I was really free, and we had very long conversations in the development of the of the comic because he was telling me his story and I was writing his story. So yeah, that was amazing.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

When it was published, did he feel like this is my story? So, did he feel that you really got onto the right points and really drew it the way that he would did it himself?

Franzi Kreis:

I hope so. You have to ask him. But it was really uh we had a very nice session because he did a limited art book. Uh the decision was to only do a thousand pieces, and uh each piece has a number, and each piece is signed by him and by me, and we signed all thousand books, which took us uh I can tell five hours. We were really sitting in the printery having this table, like signing, signing, signing all the books. One book, next book, no, one book, next book that I read and it was really a funny moment having this uh whole series finished after five five hours putting it in the tour bus so that that it was ready for traveling all the concerts that are now coming.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

That's great, and also I want to say that it's really amazing to have an artist who really treasures and respects their creative partners. I mean, in terms of people who you interview, in terms of people with life stories you work, and then it's really very special. This empathy to the stories, and I and I think we can feel it in your projects, this empathetic attitude that you have, and I think that's really precious. That's really uh sets this connection person to person to a very beautiful level. Also in art, and you know I think it's amazing that in art you're doing such a job of connecting people together. I mean it's very wonderful to this this really empathetic connection of person to person. I think it's it's not so much happening. Thank you so much. So you already said about your projects coming, but may I ask this question that you were asked back then before you did a comic? What's next?

Franzi Kreis:

So next is Buenos Aires. I had a very nice phone call today uh with a teacher who works there at a school, and hopefully, we will do a project about students and their grandparents, which is a very new story that didn't happen before. So this will be what happens until Christmas. And for next year, I'm now intensively working on a new dark room work on stage. So this is a bit of a secret because uh we don't play shame anymore.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

But for this one, 100% I'm going because I must say you are the second photographer I'm having in my podcast. And today, I really, you know, talking to you and realizing how photography can be transformed into performance. It's I think it's changing the whole future for photography, you know? Because then it's really you're turning this dark room, something very the backside kitchen, this very professional room, into something where you kind of invite us to see the miracle happening. That's a good ending, I would say. That's really something marvelous. It's something that you kind of because you know now also our relationship with photography is so mechanical. It's all about our gadgets, our devices, just to snapshots, snapshots, I don't know, Instagram stories. The price of photography, I mean the mental emotion price is almost nothing because it's kind of you can photograph, but then you show us the the meaningfulness of it like this, that it's kind of, you know, still magic.

Franzi Kreis:

And you know, the younger generation, like 10 years younger than me, beginning of their 20s, they are really into analog photography. If I can say that, for example, I had a very nice encounter. I stepped out of the back door of Volks Theater, having my really large photo paper with me, and there was a young guy on his bicycle, stopping with his bicycle, like shouting, Wow, you have you're you're enlarging in a very big size. How come? So and he he was maybe 20. So he and it turned out that he works in a photo lab and is really enthusiastic about photography. And what was super nice is that there were more and more whole groups of young people coming to the theater. So in the beginning, it was the theater audience and the literature audience because we were really lucky that Anya No won the Nobel Literature Prize two weeks after we started with the rehearsals. So again, this bow gefühl, right? Like just luck, I would say. Just being very lucky. And in the beginning, it was this uh yeah, uh throughout it was this uh literature audience and theater audience, but then we always had a group of students, like eight or nine or ten uh people in the um who were like to between twenty and twenty-five, and uh also standing around the photo lab after the show and asking how it's going. So this was a very precious moment also for me as an artist because I had this feeling of how I could also tr uh transmit this message, how nice it is to do something analog that is really working in a mechanic way.

Liudmila Kirsanova:

Franzi, thank you much for the interview. I'm really looking forward to your next projects, and because of now, I'm really feeling so inspired to experience it with my own eyes, your presence in the theater. And I'm really, really inspired by the way how you really create these empathetic projects, this storytelling, this empowering storytelling, and at the same time, you work so interestingly with the materiality of photography. So, this is what you leave us now thinking about this where photography might come in into the future, and what message with our stories and the way how we tell our stories, also, what message do we send to generation better in the future? Thank you very much for the interview. Thank you so much.