i collective, L'oiseau présente
ONE NIGHT STAND #7

 

 

25 February 16

 

© Valeria Schwarz und Martin Eder
© Valeria Schwarz und Martin Eder

 

Please note that the first part of ONE NIGHT STAND#7 is cancelled, the concert by Catherine Lorent begins at 8 pm.

The Network of Berlin Independent Project Spaces and Initiatives cordially invites you to the seventh event in the ONE NIGHT STAND series in cooperation with KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

„In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.“ (Guy Debord)

i Collective e.V. presents We Have Never Been Here Before (*), 2015, a hypnotic tour through a fictional city, developed from a concept by Valeria Schwarz and the hypnosis text and performance by Joanne Pouzenc.

Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self (2002), a series of documentaries produced for the British television, demonstrates how post-WW2 corporations and governments supported applying Sigmund Freud’s ideas in an attempt to control the masses and turn them into good consumers. A shift was needed from a needs-based to a desire-based society, in order to ensure steady economic growth and exponential development. People must be therefore “trained” to desire new products beyond their real needs. It was apparently believed that if citizens’ inner irrational desires were satisfied, they would become happy and thus stay docile. This process led to new imagery employing spectacle and entertainment methods. However, these new images not only failed in making people happier – It transformed them into unsatisfiable beings, because “The more [the spectator] contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires” (Guy Debord).

In a context of a global crisis within the ecological, financial and ultimately the psychological realm, we must revisit our individual and collective desires as well as our real needs. We Haven't Been Here Before proposes new cityscapes not based on post-war consumerism, but on a fictional city based on solidarity, knowledge exchange, sustainability and use value instead of price.

Important note: The hypnotic tour will be held in English. Please be on time. No admission after beginning of the tour!

*The title has been generously borrowed by John Jordan and it is copyleft.

i collective
Valeria Schwarz
Joanne Pouzenc

L'oiseau présente features Catherine Lorent’s multi-instrumental solo project Gran Horno, which is Spanish for “the large oven”. Her musical performance may be likened to a journey by guitar and voice on a raging sea. She ventures across the seascape, which may recall a painting by van de Velde the Younger, and holds herself against this endless sea of sound, or rather – it is her that defines this vast sea.

Catherine Lorent, (born 1977, Munich) is a Luxembourgian artist who often works with the baroque concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”). She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe, history at the University of Freiburg and art history at the Sorbonne, Paris, and wrote her PhD on history and art history. Her oeuvre combines the three fields of visual arts, music and performance and moves fluidly between them. She also regularly performs as a musician in various line-ups. In 2013 she represented her home country of Luxembourg at the Venice Biennale.

loiseaupresente.blogspot.de