Hélène F.
Performative screening and talk with Larisa Crunţeanu and Sonja Hornung
Hélène F. is a new work-in-progress by artists Larisa Crunţeanu and Sonja Hornung that looks for solace in the glitches* that disrupt the production of landscape in “green” capitalism.
Hélène works in journalism and film production as a “fixer”, so she spends much of her time looking at maps. She is fascinated by the errors that haunt satellite imagery of open cut mines. Here, holes expand so fast, their contours don’t make sense. Long-excavated towns are still marked in the wrong place. Polluted lakes are patchworked with shifting colours. Earth is haunted by wounds that never heal. Hélène proposes to meet us in the Apuseni Mountains in Romania, where copper is mined, and Lusatia, the brown coal mining region in East Germany. But from there on, our communication falters. Hélène is nowhere to be found. Left alone, we feel like trespassers in overwhelmingly vast landscapes.
It is here that we begin to see nature as artifice. These landscapes are produced: either through an imaginary of total repair—a return to a projected, semi-natural state—or through actual neglect: hyper-coloured algal blooms and fluoro-orange water, guilty-pleasure images for disaster voyeurs. Either way, unabated extraction is normalised.
Our own bodies definitely do not belong here. We are not in the proper place. What if we get caught? We ourselves begin to feel like glitches. We let go of fixing, and instead, attempt to dismantle images—of the earth, of the landscape, of ourselves.
A rough cut of the video work will be shown, accompanied by a live reading and sound. After the screening, we welcome your questions and comments, leading into an open discussion of the themes raised by the work.
* we here owe much to Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020)
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Larisa Crunțeanu’s works create contexts in which facts and memories are reactivated, encouraging a shared effort and the emergence of new practices. Many of her projects reflect on the notion of collaboration and the ideas existing behind objects and stories.
Sonja Hornung’s artistic practice takes as its starting-point crises spurred on by private property formats, gentrification, and financialisation, investigating how these affect the relationship between bodies and spaces. The textile garment, which encrypts this relationship, is a recurring motif in her work, which also draws on text and mixed media. Sonja and Larisa’s artistic conversation began in 2015 with the body of work Femina subtetrix. Over the years, thematic threads from Femina subtetrix escaped into their individual artistic practices, and were picked up on again in later collaborations – including the ways in which bodies gendered female negotiate the production of our own images in privatised spaces, and the power of camouflage as it collapses the boundaries between “natural” and “artificial”.
The presentation is part of the project Helene Fixeuse, developed by Copia Originala Association, and co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration (AFCN)* and the Romanian Cultural Institute (ICR)**.
*The project does not necessarily represent the position of the National Cultural Fund Administration. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the results of the project may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the financing.
**This project is co-financed by the Romanian Cultural Institute through the Cantemir Programme – a funding framework for cultural projects intended for the international environment. The Romanian Cultural Institute cannot be held responsible for the content of this material.
