Vita
I explore questions of communication and society, as well as emotion and interpretation. I work across media and styles, utilizing both narrative formats as well as abstract, associative approaches. My work has travelled beyond 20 countries. I create documentaries, experimental and essay films. I have produced installations, a science fiction novel, live visuals for music and plays, wrote the libretto to an opera, produce music and experimental paintings. My different approaches come from a necessity of artistic creation and are tools for intrinsic research, expanding the realm of experience.
In these dreary times of crisis, entities ponder in various states of dispair. They are the voices in my head that chatter during downtime, when I'm in autopilot mode: Fake news fairytale tellers roam the country, naked kings build themselves Mars rocket castles. The symptoms of the collapsing collective escalate like pustules: bunker builders, crypto sectarians. The proletariat scans its own groceries and then eliminates itself. Somewhere, a protest against oil, against war, shipwrecked by realpolitik, they float on their signs. The animal shelter closes, the meat counter grows. Burning flying cars. It's polycrisis.
cylixe has been performing as visual jockey under the name VJ CLX for live video performances and events since '09. Creating visuals with clips, live cams, animations, and found footage on walls, furniture, and people in collaboration with DJs, bands, musicians, and dancers. Synaesthising music and movement, expanding the definition of the term “moving image” in a performative setting. The clips come from a diverse, constantly growing archive, spanning time and genre, and wildly associating form and content with classical, electronic, hip hop, and experimental music.
Created for various not for profit organisations, amongst them, masken-berlin during covid, CCC magazine Die Datenschleuder, Technisches Hilfswerk, Sportclub Lurich in Kreuzberg and more.
The earth is lost. In the wasteland of a frighteningly real future after the great cataclysm, it's high time to make the turn. But before Mike Tango, Sierra Sierra, Charlie Golf and Mandy Lemon can take off, the ship and on-board computer have to work togetjer. On closer inspection, they turn out to be astonishingly idiosyncratic and lively. Defekt is a commissioned work in cooperation with the Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre, the most important festival for contemporary music theatre, which is joining forces with the Staatstheater Kassel for this world premiere.
In this walking theater piece, we listen to the stories of a time traveler as we walk through the city. Along the way, we discover virtual installations from the future that envelop today's Berlin like a new skin. The consequences of our current lifestyle, waste, species loss, and climate change are part of this world, but so are greater solidarity, more foresight, redistribution, and technological and political progressiveness.
“Dear former past” was sponsored by the Hebbel am Ufer Theater, Berlin.
Images that evoke cinematic, dreamlike worlds, doors into subconscious mind games. Hidden within the energetic style is a cautious fragility that entices the eye. The titles give the works further associative tangents. Between laconicism and poetry, they quietly ask viewers for interpretations. The works invite interpretation. Viewers can rush through daydreams and inspirations; there are no easy answers.
Today, more women* than ever before are sailing the seas. As Shefarer*innen, activists, artists, and researchers, they are exploring hydrarchy as an alternative way of life, attempting to reclaim ports as public spaces, and fighting for decolonization, sea rescue, fair trade, and endangered maritime ecosystems. A documentary of the first Shefarer* parade in Hamburg, initiated by geheimagentur/Kampnagel. Created with film footage from participants, sound collages, and live recordings of the parade.
Multiple video/audio sources are available on a concert stage. The album was written in collaboration with various machine learning algorithms and functions as an installation or performance.
Premiere in April 2021 at Les Tanneries Art Center, France.
There was a thing to the light, to the hills, the road,” said the Martian. “I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world...”
Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
An outdoor shopping center at night is a painful dissonance, a failed third space. Nothing lives here; it is a cold, dead void.
The diary of a time traveler. A photographic journey through the quiet streets of Berlin at night, a time machine to experience her journey, video essays, and puzzles.
The work was created during the young academy residency, as part of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.
After death, the Parsi Zoroastrians leave their bodies to the vultures, in accordance with ancient tradition. The priests of this Indian minority ensure that they are placed on structures in the heart of Mumbai. However, the vulture population is declining because they are falling victim to the drug diclofenac, which is used in livestock farming. Based on interviews, research, animations, and experimental structural elements, the film paints a picture of a complex situation.
This film was produced through a successful crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.
In the winter of 2013, my father retired. He had worked as a butcher his entire life. His world consisted of work, his worldview of clearly defined roles. My father is not an extraordinary person; his story is not unique. Old photographs, mixed with impressions from his everyday life, as well as excerpts from interviews recorded during a trip, form the image of a stereotype, only to break it down and look behind the façade. In search of the origin of the myth of masculinity, I try to find out what made my father the man he is today.
In interviews with the inhabitants of Meinersen we explore different life situations and ask about the foundation of togetherness. The camera follows its own path; From Eichenhof to Waldschwimmbad, from supermarket to highway. One moves towards another. This film was developed with the support of the Bösenberg Foundation.
“When you enter an existential crisis, all filters fall. Reality is shaded in low contrast, low key, foggy. Every outside signal grinds mind and teeth and exaggerates to a feedback loop. Every thought is a downward spiral. A well-known staircase for the experienced traveler in the self-destructive regions of the mind.” An urban essay film searching for sense and philosophy. The film funded by Arte Creative accepted into the curated “Emerging Artists” program by AG Kurzfilm.
The city that never sleeps produces eleven thousand tons of garbage every day. Thadius and Andre make sure that the giant doesn't implode. And they enjoy their work. Created during the master's program at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and funded by the German National Academic Foundation, this film received the REC Doku Clip Award in 2013.
When construction of a skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela, was halted over 20 years ago, no one could have guessed that this building would become the tallest occupied house in the world. A fractal view of the everyday life of the residents dialogues with the architecture of the tower, which was designed as a financial center and now houses a parallel society. A diploma project on politics and structural squatting in Venezuela, the film received the Arte Creative Newcomer Award 2013 and a nomination in the Berlinale Shorts Competition 2013.
A long deadpan view on strangeness in two respects. Geographically far of, much further when it comes to paradigms. With incomprehension but stoic curiosity, the observer tries to approach the foreignness objectively. Though in the end, she will only be able to declare and nominate based on her own socialization. Environmental events are not of any help. Film received an honorable mention at the REC Youth Media Festival in Berlin 2011.
A long deadpan view on strangeness in two respects. Geographically far of, much further when it comes to paradigms. With incomprehension but stoic curiosity, the observer tries to approach the foreignness objectively. Though in the end, she will only be able to declare and nominate based on her own socialization. Environmental events are not of any help. Film received an honorable mention at the REC Youth Media Festival in Berlin 2011.
