[2015 / 2022] The Resilience Complex

2-Channel HD-video, narrative script, photograph
Dimensions variable

Responding to contemporary social transformations and their effects on working and living conditions, The Resilience Complex explores the relationship of subjectivity, creative labour, systems and environment through the concept of the "flexible human." Against prevailing resilience narratives, it takes the exhausted subject as a counter-model and invokes the artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874–1927) as both medium and revenant. Combining photographic, computer-generated and moving images with language, the project draws on historical documents and archival material alongside contemporary popular, literary and theoretical sources, interweaving past and present into real-and-imagined spatiotemporal constellations.

"[…] Imagine the house is a frame for a view. Then the view enters the house—convoluting the relation between inside and outside, imaginary and real, immediate and mediated, connection and separation. Snow falls slightly. Steam builds up. The weather changes. Now think of the window as a lens and the house itself as a camera pointed towards nature. Wouldn’t it provide us with one more flat image? It has been said that knowledge falls into a trap when it makes representations of space the basis for the study of 'life'. No matter what one uses to photograph an object, the image remains a grainy approximation. Like the translation of human life into columns and rows. Hence can the body, with its capacity for action, and its various energies, be said to create space? She places herself into the clinical construct of the living surface. Her body is fragmented, framed not only by the camera but by the house itself. Enclosed by a space whose limits are defined by a gaze. The strategy of physical separation and visual connection, of framing, is enhancing the stage-like effect. Planes and axes, duplication and reflection, repetition and differentiation. She once read that mirrors appear to be openings, and openings can be mistaken for mirrors. She sees nothing. She is an attachment to a wall that is no longer simply there. Tracing the shift from the spatialized image of the Creative Suite to the immaterializing image of the Creative Cloud: from apartment to cloud. The house is in the air. There is no front, no back, no side to the house. The house can be in any place. The house is immaterial.* […]" – Excerpt from script The Resilience Complex