IN CONVERSATION
with New Bretagne: Larifari Disko Party - Nostalgia in the Stranglehold of Art
26 October 2015

 

Series of conversations with curators and guests in and around of Cologne about currents projects and questions towards contemporary art

Q: Nostalgia is "not an emotion that is entertained; it is substained", said Hollis Frampton to his eponymous film. Why are you interested - as artists and as artist collective - particularily today in these outdated and (emotional) forms of memory construction?
A: The term "nostalgia" is used by us to describe contemporary strategies and techniques that we view as reactions to the slickness of our (post-) digital aestehtic and their affinity to superficialities and perfection in context tp perceiving futuristic realities. We understand nostalgia in this sense not as a transformative return to the past. With regards to artistic practice, nostalgia could instead represent an attempt to consider time as a contextual and aestetic reference to think non-linearly. A practice, in which nature experiences a new kind of comeback of the faulty and organic.

New Bretagne are Frieder Haller, Anna-Lisa Högler, Phung-Tien Phan, Alexander Schöpfel and Niklas Taleb - students of former students of Folkwang University of Art in Essen. Belle Air is an artist run space, which is organized and curated by New Bretagne.

Funding and Support
Cultural Office of the City of Cologne

Images
New Bretagne, 2015
Courtesy by New Bretagne