Lucie Freynhagen
bangaloREsident@Walkin Studios
Lucie Freynhagen's works create a situation that, similar to the cave drawings of Lascaux, transforms referential images aesthetically linked to their fellow human beings into stories of their own. Overcoming impotence, the artist creates spectacles that assert themselves as part of reality. Her artistic practice becomes magic to transfigure attributions, ideals, images of hope and intentions. For history is based on narrative. Whether you call it imposture or recontextualisation, her works attempt to dislodge fixed ideas and give them a new face. For what is imaginable is possible and thus potentially also part of the definitional stage of our history. Systems of reference and their modes of operation are skilfully hollowed out, emptied and filled again. A reconquest of the identity of things. Remembered, they become set pieces of participation and tools of a reality that surrounds us and, as a disenchantment, confront the "value bidel" of a capitalist mill wheel of our present time. A destabilisation of the boundaries between the work and its outside, the actual and the inauthentic and their interrelation. The narratives bring together fictional and actual occurrences, using a range of aesthetic registers to suggest alternatives to the social status quo. They create a place. A gathering that might be called a meeting, or council, where a question, concern, or issue is negotiated. They invite speculation and renegotiate attributions of the past, present and future.
(Text: Iris Dankemeyer)
During her stay in Bangalore, Lucie would like to realise various 3D animations together with video actors and video artists on site. The material created will be used in the form of video collages for the web series of the art project ContentContent, which began in 2021, and also as projection for upcoming stage plays.
ContentContent is a multimedia performance format that flows into digital artistic and thematic video formats and forms as a series. Drawing from diverse creative backgrounds as musicians, dancers, and media artists, ContentContent explores "normality" in relation to contemporary culture and presents itself as a postmodern jungle of convoluted systems and cultural memes in which performers are either experts, researchers, prisoners, or survivors. ContentContent experiments with different ways of translating text into performative scenarios, sometimes directly into full-fledged musical scenes and sometimes into sober or abstract scenarios reminiscent of scientific explanations. Between strictly choreographed, pre-produced scenes and "conceptual" improvisation, ContentContent explores the tension between Busby Berkley and the most esoteric pieces of William Forsythe. The serial video formats also develop a mix of electronic, electroacoustic and analogue music, using musical algorithms, sample sourcing and vaporwave* influenced tracks, as well as traditional songwriting, influenced by "nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the zeitgeist, technology and advertising of previous decades". *Vaporwave is a music and art movement that emerged in the early 2010s as an internet phenomenon in net culture and still has a close affinity to the meme culture there. Shaping the style, especially in the beginning, were, among others, technology, video games, postmodernism, consumer culture, and the design, advertising and music aesthetics of the period. ContentContent aims to use internet phenomena, especially from the "early" or "innocent" internet, for actors as capacities for action and interaction, projecting the rotating pinwheel of the Mac computer, well-known memes and the works of internet artists as visualisations onto and around performers.
ContentContent is a media performance about the urgency of making art at the "end of the world", or at the end of a collection of shifting realities that make up the dreamscape of late capitalism. It is performance, live music, computer art, embodied text, dance, choreography and video. The performance reflects the premise of the frenzied internalisation of information in contemporary society by constantly slipping back and forth between different forms of representation. Within the serial video format, we are presented with opera arias, dance numbers, monologues and lectures that are both content content and in turn comment on it. The format alternates between the stiffened and sterile presence of TedTalk-like discussion and the intrigue of a musical, which is a complex, non-linear behemoth performed mostly by non-human actors at dizzying emotional heights. Overall, ContentContent takes a hard look at the paralysis of a generation caught in a post-ironic feedback loop involving gamification, memeification and instant wish fulfilment through algorithmic predictions. These ideas are placed in a performative context and then discussed by our two main protagonists: two "children of the 90s" who are omniscient and omnipresent, but unable to effect the changes they deem necessary in their environment.
In this way, ContentContent can be used to highlight truths that have shaped the last decade, such as the ever-increasing sense of isolation within a capitalist society, the values that are spent above all else, or the growing amount of existential angst inherited by each successive generation as the planet hurtles towards certain doom through unbearable amounts of carbon dioxide. To look at contemporary society through the lens of the traditional musical is to see the tension between the things we want from existence and the things we have to deal with in order to achieve and elevate them.
This residency is in partnership with the City of Dresden.