Schirn Kunsthalle

Britta Thie

Translan­tics

28 Apr 2015 - 16 Jan 2016

BRITTA THIE
Translan­tics
Digital Exhibition
28 April 2015 - 16 January 2016

Translan­tics, a digital inti­mate play, tells the story of three young women. It deals with a circle of friends consisting of expats, hyped up and euphoric, all together glob­al­ized and still captured in their own cultural system.

Translan­tics is an episodic web series that follows three young German women as they navi­gate life in the Euro­zone. Germans in a sea of expats and expats abroad in their own lives, the protag­o­nists are joined by a revolving cast of friends who play them­selves or versions of them­selves. Constantly crossing paths and crossing wires, they cope, adapt and glitch out as their rela­tion­ships are contin­u­ally re-networked and auto-updated. What happens to expe­ri­ences like inti­macy when emotion, affect, and intel­li­gence have become prod­ucts on an already flooded market?

Rela­tion­ships unfold before mall display windows; in train dining cars; throughout the lush coun­try­side of provin­cial home­towns; in run-down galleries loaded with artworks imported from New York; beneath Frank­furt’s mono­lithic corpo­rate archi­tec­ture; and across the streets of a glowing, frantic, decrepit Berlin: the nerve center of the transna­tional culture class that never­the­less remains perpet­u­ally periph­eral, the histor­ical land­mark that has clum­sily erased its own past with attempts at the future. Product, lifestyle, Pots­damer Platz. Every throw­back is a throw-forward.

The series may be a gener­a­tional portrait, but the gener­a­tion (‘89, plus or minus) is a gener­a­tion in test-phase; the present is empty, and everyone is in between: zwis­chen hin und her, him and her, then and now. Reso­lu­tion dials up and then dies down. Pupils dilate as center swiftly encroaches on periphery. With stories conveyed through smart­phone cameras, skype windows, and contact lenses, each self-contained episode embodies its subject – form follows flux.