The video work “Sylvie” (together with Anne-Sophie Brunold) often changes signs in a theatre-like rehearsal room: the identity, role and goal of the two actresses can never be clearly identified. Based on fragments of the text “Whole Days – Whole Nights” by Xavier Durringer (1996), a speculative space emerges between staging, role and gender in the context of a feminist self-claim.
Sylvie, together with Anne-Sophie Brunold, 2022
Narrative Video, 5:00 Min.
Courtesy: Patrick Alan Banfield
Director of Cinematography: Nicolas C. Geissler
Sound & Colour Correction: Magnus Maurath
Woman 1: Lara Last
Woman 2: Anne-Sophie Brunold
During the rehearsal, both actresses repeatedly bring in personal themes, such as living through trauma, constructing a self-worth contingency, lostness as well as evaluation and rejection towards their own gender.
The questions of “who am I” and “who do I want to be” point to an increasingly diffuse discourse of feminism in which new groups (cf. the debate on (radical) feminism and acceptance of transpersons) often appropriate arguments and characteristics only rhetorically and thus reduce them to absurdity.