She Dolls With Dollies

Portraits appropriated from old films and magazines become anonymized: Radiant tulips and spiky cacti whir behind cut-out mattes of peoples' heads. The flowers rotate, dance, pulsate. A botanical fever dream unfolds, framed by lustrous hair, pearl necklaces, evening gowns or gray uniforms. In contrast to the vibrant frenzy of the floral imagery, the framing sources of the mattes are static and in black and white. The imagery is accompanied by Kurt Schwitters' poem Sie Puppt mit Puppen / She Dolls With Dollies from 1944. It is fragmented from the get go, with lines tumbling to and fro until the words break down and dissolve into an electronic beatbox carpet of sound. Individual words crystallize out of the rhythmically fragmented babble. In the end, the short poem is heard in its original entirety. The video created by Karin Fisslthaler is a visual interpretation of the audio composition by Anna Clementi and Thomas Stern, which wildly transforms Schwitters' poem as it taps into the author's interest in decomposition and deconstruction.  

A richly allusive iconography is distilled in the collaged silhouettes of Carole Lombard, Marilyn Monroe and Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others. Fragments flash up reporting on the proliferation of heroin that took place in the 1970s, amidst densely woven layers of glamourous cinema and pop culture. The glossy catalogue is haunted by stories of young women forced into prostitution or even driven to their death as a result of their addiction. The outline of a person passed out or dead on a tiled floor is also given a floral filler. While a maelstrom of images devours her, the “little dolls” and “tiny dollies” continue to resound in staccato. Schwitters' mutation of diminutive terms within the dynamics of love had already played on principles of difference and repetition, and becomes cinematographically heightened in this work, ultimately reaching a cascade of anonymized faces and contemplatively photographed flower beds to a point that they seem almost interchangeable. (Charlie Bendisch, Friederike Horstmann)

Translation: Eve Heller

The video work Sie puppt mit Puppen/ She dolls with Dollies was created as a visual interpretation of the piece by vocalist, singer, and composer Anna Clementi and sound researcher, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Thomas Stern. Their album "DOPPELMOPPEL - Poems by Kurt Schwitters", capturing the spirit of Schwitters' "Merz-Gesamtweltbild", will be released in September 2024 by Corvo Records/Berlin. Fascinated by the poetry of the famous German MERZ/DADA artist Kurt Schwitters, the duo began a decades-long artistic exploration and intensive collaboration. They transformed Schwitters' poems into contemporary electronic sounds, from poetry readings to unconventional melodies and experimental sound-poetry eruptions. The visual execution avoids illustrating the text and attempts a visual composition using individual images, stop-motion, and various forms of collage created under the camera.