Lara Nelke

"Your nervous energy won't be especially useful today. Overnight oats, gig economy, you're a peasant who eats gruel. Mid-crisis you should [now] figure out how to be uomo universale the ideal interdisciplinary being. Or if you have time for that: Lying flat is a wise movement, only by lying down humans become the measure of all things (In reference to the tang ping movement). But lying down makes you vulnerable: I hope no one will step on you while you do so. The question I ask myself is: How can I behead my own king? I am my own king and peasant."

I am my own king and peasant
WIP installation, 2022 at TRUST Berlin ✦

Ceremony: Groundbreaking/Groundhealing
Site-specific installation, Performance, 2022 ✦ Info

Ceremony: Groundbreaking/Groundhealing is a two-part performance with a set of abstract tools. The ritual achieves to create space in the urban site through bodily practice performed as symbolical and manual labour. The first part is a groundbreaking ceremony cosplay to initiate the performance. The second part is working on a construction site in Athens with useless tools, to perform useless labour. Doing this works as an act of resistance against productivity and capitalist logic while deconstructing the work tools reveals their purpose and power infrastructure as well.
Groundbreaking is the ceremony of celebrating the beginning of a construction project. The old builder’s rite consist of digging into the „untouched ground“ with a shovel to initiate the actual labour on the site. If you look at images from this nowadays, sand in a sad-looking bucket or in a sandbox is being dug up with a bow-tied, gold-plated shovel and sloppily thrown on the site. Usually company CEOs, mayors, planners and investors are performing the act. Manual labour is exposed as a spectacle, while „Capitalists are cosplaying workers“. In a grotesque way in this ceremony the capitalist alienation of labour and infrastructures of power suddenly become visible. Those who decide on an urban structural transformation actually don’t perform the work.
The performances and sculptures were part of the group show In Search of Overwhelming Banality: The Status Quo of Public Spaces at One Minute Space, Athens in 2022.

What Is My Life Now That I Am Never Bored?
Moment I: Constructing Karesansui
Performance, 2020 ✦ Info

Four interventions taking place in an urban place people usually don‘t have access to, but all witness: Construction sites. They are cracks in the urban landscape which unveil the city’s hidden logics and authority infrastructures. Through them, the speed at which the city is undergoing structural change becomes visible, thus they are a metaphor of growth, compression and the closure of open spaces. Moments I–IV are seen as rituals of contemplation and temporarily occupy the prohibited space through ephmeral installations, mediating objects and performative actions. The subversive appropriation is invasive, but not destructive. In Moment I the ground of a construction site in Berlin was arranged to resemble a japanese karesansui, a dry stone temple garden in which the sand is raked in waves around ojects to resemble the flow of the ocean. The action itself is contemplative, a meditation and follows a poetic narrative. Doing a useless act can be an act of resistance agains productivity and capitalist logic. The formation lasted one day until the ground was sealed to be a new street.

What Is My Life Now That I Am Never Bored?
Moment II: Look What Too Late
Site-specific installation, 2020 ✦ Info

Moment II captures poetic observations, urban dialogue snippets in form of Haiku poems. The essence of this poetry acknowledges that everything, every moment, will pass and can never be recreated again and by thus celebrated as beautiful. Attachable to any construction site scaffolding structure, the pieces open a dialogic moment in urban space. The curtain-like, breezy fabric creates a colorful passage under a scaffolding. Here, strangers pass by each other in meandering ways and maybe create a fleeting moment of togetherness. At night, the reflective letters are illuminated by traffic and city lights and visible from afar.

What Is My Life Now That I Am Never Bored? Moment IV:
Barrier Meditation
Chairs, 2020 ✦ Info

How do you do nothing in public space when it is mostly divided into zones of constant consumption, movement, and production? Moment IV: Barrier Meditations considers a stool as a tool to intervene in urban environments. It creates places to rest, independent of the location’s intended purpose. The legs of the wooden stools perfectly fit into construction fence feet. This compatibility allows to rethink the fence – a barrier – as a temporary site of intervention, contemplation, and conversation in public space. The small bright stools are easy to disassemble and carry around. Their organic shape invites to sit down while their bright colors stand out against the grey concrete. This temporary urban piece of furniture turns passengers into dwellers, into spectators who watch the surrounding street scenes in solitude or in company with others.

What Is My Life Now That I Am Never Bored? Moment III:
Kintsugi Debris
Site-specific installation, 2020 ✦ Info

Important infrastructures in the ground of cities such as electricity or water pipes are sprayed with luminous paint on constructions sites so that they can be recognized in the surrounding sand. Using the same technique of making the invisible visible, debris and pavement stones were collected and painted in bright colors. The recently worthless material is transformed into something unique. They are treated as something special and precious and question our treatment of urban ressources.

Third Landscape
Performance, 2020

AC Sofa / AC ソファー
Sculpture, 2019 ✦ Info

How we perceive often unnoticed functional, architectural infrastructures, or basic amenities, when they are repurposed or relocated? Providing us with comfort daily, an air-conditioning system is usually hidden inside a building’s walls. By adding specific attributes, its original purpose was transformed and expanded: The piece’s materiality imitates a part of an AC tube that is clearly visible at the gallery’s ceiling while functioning as a piece of furniture. The sculpture generates different levels of interaction with and between spectators. It is primarily a place for gathering and conversation but simultaneously influences the temperature in its immediate surrounding. A slight cooling breeze blows through the vent. It is generated by the built-in ventilator thatoperates on a timer-based rhythm. This artwork was part of the group show Sampling at MAU Gallery in Tokyo in 2019.

POLYETHERNET
Sculpture, 2019 ✦ Info

In reaction to the hyperactivity of today‘s accelerated societies and the permanent exhaustion of the performing human being, a place of collective dwelling was created. The vision was a place of protection and retreat in the digital age as a platform for dialogical processes, in which coming together creates new rituals of communication. The work is a place of dwelling that explores the role of empathy in communication, and whether it is related to physical presence. Sitting in the work evokes the idea of being put in someone else’s place. Its individual foam modules were created in a multi-layered working process before they were stacked on top of each other. First, the outlines of people laying next to each other in the analog were digitally traced and rendered. Then, they were brought back into physical space, cut out of the foam material. In the exhibition, the visitor is immersed in these left-behind, empty body shells; a trace of corporeality remains. The installation was exhibited at Erratum gallery Berlin and Vorspiel transmediale 2019 in Berlin.

In collaboration with Anna Osterberg

In Public Space We Trust
Performance, Objects, 2019 ✦ Info

The square at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin is historically associated as a place of freedom – especially with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Nevertheless the configuration of the square is continuously regulated, not everyone is authorized to be everywhere. Who is permitted and who suspicious is determined by a higher control authority. The barrier fence is by it‘s connotation and materiality an sturdy tool of controlling peoples bodies in public spaces by authority. By making it soft, bendable and attaching it to the body, it suddenly becomes a playful tool to appropriate the place and its bodies through the body of a performer.

In collaboration with Anna Osterberg