UNICA

UNICA is named after the writer and artist Unica Zürn (1916 – 1970), whose illustrated text The House of Illnesses (1958) figures her body and her institutionalisation as one formation. Rethinking contemporary forms of immersion in simulated worlds through Zürn’s body-building, UNICA attends to the syncretic lifeforms that emerge from the intra-actions between the organismic, technological and phantasmal today. The latent presence of an unnamed catastrophe is repeatedly evoked by the protagonists, an artist and a motion-capture performer, via overlapping references to post-apocalyptic computer games, drawings, and dreams. This deliberate indeterminacy is extended to Teufelsberg, a forested hill on the outskirts of Berlin made from the debris of Second World War ruins, where parts of the work were filmed. By merging motion capture with quasi-archaeological procedures, UNICA calls attention to the artificial naturalisation of historical and ongoing violence, and the conditions of possibility for its disruption and decoding.