Staging Mimicry

Film programme
Chronus Art Centre Shanghai, CN, December 2017
Depo Istanbul, TR, May 2018
Curated by Marlies Pöschl and Katharina Swoboda


Films:

Bernd Oppl: Sick Building, 2013, 7 min
Lukas Marxt/Marcel Odenbach: Fishing is not done on Tuesdays, 2017, 15 min
Sena Başöz: Be the Doctor, Practise Nursing, 2016, 7 min
Marlies Pöschl: Untitled (Lost Horizon), 2014, 7 min
Bernhard Staudinger: Sichuan, 2014, 9 min
Katharina Swoboda: Reconstructing Z, 2014, 2 min
Dorit Margreiter: Broken Sequence, 2013, 8 min
Katharina Swoboda: Penguin Pool, 2015, 3 min
Simona Obholzer: -5°C 40%rF, 2016, 7 min

In his work on mimicry, Roger Caillois (1931-78) showed that, contrary to popular belief, an insect’s ability to camouflage itself has no survival value. Moreover, it is “excessive” for survival; it is a surplus to life. By mimicking itself, the insect also creates a second identity for itself. “The mimicking insect lives its camouflaged existence as not quite itself, [but] as another,” writes cultural theorist Eliszabeth Grosz. “The capacity to imitate one’s habitat or surroundings, far from performing an adaptive function, witnesses the captivation of a creature by its representations of and as space, its displacement from the center, from a ‘consciousness’ of its place (in its body, located in space) to the perspective of another.” According to Caillois, there is a rupture in the subjective identity of the insect – the mimicking insect feels as if what is happening inside its body actually comes from outside. Extending the term mimicry to the field of architecture and art, in this discussion we will explore the artistic surplus of mimicry. Which aesthetic realms do artists create through strategies of mimicry and camouflage?