Concept, text, performance, edit: Tanya Ury
Tattoo Artist: Andy Wolf
Camera (in Tattoo documentation): Gesa Marten
Assistant (in Tattoo documentation): Ralph Plachetka
Voice over (man): Richard Layzell
Voice over (woman): Tanya Ury
Documentation Feminale Women’s Film Festival, Cologne (D) 1994: Claudia Wissmann

A split-screen video (33 mins) of 7 filmed, live performances, edited by Rainer Nellisen was produced in 2003.

Trailer 5 minutes

The poetic texts of Kölnisch Wasser have been published as part of
Die Gehängten in Patriarchat der Vernunft – Matriarchat des Gefühls? Geschlechterdifferenzen im Denken und Fühlen (Patriarchy of Rationality - Matriarchy of Feeling? Gender Difference, Thinking and Feeling), publ. Daedalus Verlag Munster ISBN 3-89126-167-5 (D) 2001

The manuscript to Kölnisch Wasser including camera directions was compiled in 2007

The tattoo documentation was filmed in 1993. In the complete video/performance the live action occurs elsewhere – in another room or another building - the video images were relayed to the spectators by cable. The split screen version of Kölnisch Wasser, while sometimes recreating the original 4-monitor format, allows extracts from seven documented performances (1993-97) to be seen.

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A tattoo is a religious taboo; a tattooed person would not be allowed a burial in a Jewish cemetery.

“You shall not gash yourselves in mourning for the dead; you shall not tattoo yourselves. I am the Lord.” Leviticus 19,28.

On 6th February 1993, in a small tattoo shop in Cologne, Germany, Tanya Ury had the number 4711, tattooed onto her right thigh. 4711 is the number of the famous Eau de Cologne, 'Kölnisch Wasser'. Many members of Ury's Jewish family, who had been citizens of Cologne, were deported from there to concentration camps.

The video/performance Kölnisch Wasser is dedicated to victims of sexual exploitation, violence, of racism and genocide. Pornography is cultural colonisation of (women's) bodies. As a Western world currency it swiftly swept into the East at the end of the cold war. Genocide is pornography carried to its natural conclusion. A camera lens may convey media images from Auschwitz, Bosnia and the degradation of women in pornography but the separation of time and location restrains our sense of moral responsibility.

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“The day after getting the tattoo, I travelled from Cologne back to England where I was living. That evening I watched a television documentary about Milena Jesenská, recorded during my absence; she was the first translator of Kafka’s work (from German into Czechoslovakian). I wanted to know more about her, having only read Kafka’s letters to Milena, written during their two-year love affair from 1920 on; Max Brod published these posthumously and against Kafka’s will, although he burnt Milena’s letters.

I discovered that Milena had later become an ardent socialist and editor of her own newspaper Nàrodnì Listy; because of her resistance activities, the writing and publishing of outspoken, anti-fascist articles and the fact that she assisted many to escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, Jesenská was eventually deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women. Her number there was 4714 but her friends called her 4711, after the famous Eau de Cologne.

This video is dedicated to my grandmother Hedwig Ury, my two great-aunts Ella Unger and Grete Schiemann (both came from Cologne), to my father’s cousin, who at 15 was used as a concentration camp whore, before also being murdered and to Milena Jesenská who died in Ravensbrück, 1944.”

Tanya Ury