Artist Talk and Film Presentation: Mermaids, Ghosts and Haunted Spaces with Miri Ian Gossing und Lina Sieckmann

Mermaids, Ghosts, and Haunted Space – The Hybrid Experimental Films of Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann
http://www.gossing-sieckmann.com

DATE & TIME: Thursday, Dec. 4, 16:40-18:10
VENUE: W48.004

Originally from Cologne, Germany, Gossing and Sieckmann have been working collaboratively since 2012. Blending experimental film, visual art, and hybrid storytelling, they explore themes of subcultural and queer communities, memory, and hauntologies. Using 16mm film, their works merge documentary and fiction while challenging traditional notions of filmmaking. Their visual language revolves around weird architectures, speculative fictions, posthumanism, surfaces of desire, and trans mythologies.

In their debut feature-length film Sirens Call, which premiered at this year’s Berlinale, they take us on a 120-minute, genre-bending journey between sci-fi, road movie, and subcultural documentary on Mermaid culture, imagining new siren figures that could act as catalysts for a more compassionate future. (Trailer)

The artists choose symbolically charged places for their observations: single-family homes in American suburbia, high-rise chapels in Nevada, or the adventure architectures of a ferry staged as a cruise ship. Their short films are characterized by a dramaturgy in which the protagonists remain invisible, while their stories are told by an off-camera voice composed of interview questions and fragments of chatroom contributions. The traces of the absent figures become visible in fetishized objects that turn into unruly symbols of unfulfilled desires and dreams.

This event is hosted by the Junior-Professorship of North American Literature and Future Studies in Collaboration with TUDiSC.