The Soap&Skin

Anja Plaschg: Actually, I’m from the neighboring village Katzendorf. It not only sounds much nicer than Poppendorf, it also fits better. We always had cats on the farm. In the heyday, there were 25 at once. Unfortunately, with about 200 inhabitants, Katzendorf is so small that it even vanishes off the Internet. I wanted to correct it on Wikipedia once, but someone changed it back to Poppendorf.

I am quite grateful I could grow up like this, even if bad things happened. Country life and childhood on a farm can be wonderful. Everyone knows each other, everyone helps each other out. But I think my hometown is still something fascinating and inspiring for me today mainly because I left at a young age. The distance lets me dream. I don’t know how I would feel about it if I had stayed longer in Katzendorf. 

I only realized later just how absurd my daily life really was. For instance, my way to school led through the cemetery. Each morning, I would greet dead people in their graves. When I came home, there was often a dead pig in front of the door. Sometimes, I was excused from school because the pigs had escaped from the barn. Then the whole village had to help catch them again. The pigs always fascinated me. I fed them secretly and gave them names. It was especially exciting when the people from the rendering plant came. When the gates of the transport vehicles opened, we would climb on top of the silo to take a look inside. I became a vegetarian when I turned 14...

I can only speak for myself, but I was rather precocious. I wanted to experience everything as early as possible. By the age of 12, I was already smoking and taking part in alcohol excesses at various fire department festivities.

... it is full of morbidity and dreariness. For me, the province also has something oppressive and depressing. If you’re different, you stand out. I was always a black sheep, but at some point, I downright anticipated this role and used it as an engine for my creativity.

Definitely. Besides this psychological oppression that takes hold in a village community, it was Catholicism, above all, that influenced me: the village chapels, the arch-Catholic rituals.

My parents less so, but my grandmother was a very devout person. Once, she called me a witch because I stole a sugar cube from her room. Everything was a sin. I experienced the death of my grandparents up close. It was a prolonged death in bed. “Heavenly Mother, help!” my grandmother kept screaming. This adoration, these cries for help are burned deep into my memory.  

Yes, nature and especially water are the theme of this album. I think it’s a huge problem that humans have become so disconnected from nature. You don’t have to take drugs to perceive a tree, to recognize its beauty, to understand what it does and what stories it tells. Engaging with nature is not just for hippies or esoterics. If we continue like this, the Earth will die. We can’t look away any longer. People cling to hollow things to distract them from the gloomy conditions of the world. If I don’t sense a connection to nature in an artwork, it doesn’t interest me. During the pandemic, an opera house in Barcelona staged a string quartet by Puccini for over 2000 potted plants. That moved me to tears, for example. It was a call for a more careful approach to nature.

A film project in which I play the lead role and do the film music. For 40 days of shooting, I played a poor and very devout peasant woman from the 17th century. As preparation, I spent a lot of time in Katzendorf, I had to learn my dialect again.

When I came to Vienna, it was suddenly gone. It just fell off me, it wasn’t a conscious rejection. It was an interesting process to return home again, also linguistically.

Being on the countryside gives me peace of mind like nothing else can. Animals also manage to somehow draw me right up into the here and now. Their presence is so invigorating because they do not judge. The intelligence of nature is an approachable and permissive one. In its order and cycles, it tells everything about life. But there’s no reason to romanticize about country life. Perhaps, it is again something so typically human, that one has to first be completely separated from it – driven out of paradise, so to speak – in order to truly return to it.