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.