JUST WANT YOU TO BE (2021)
HD video, 15:52 min, color, sound

“The promise of happiness acquires an even more powerful hold in times of crisis.”

Ale Bachlechner collages the idiosyncratic archive of her personal mobile phone videos to connect individual moments of ordinary affect (driving with granny, teenagers at a fun ride, petting a donkey) to the social norms they point at (what is a family, what is freedom, what is a pet). The video is inspired by and uses quotes from Sara Ahmed’s queer, feminist and anti-racist analysis of how the promise of happiness functions as a moral imperative and disciplinary technique.

The work was commissioned by medienwerk.NRW as part of the series “REVISITED: Reservate der Sehnsucht”, that asked actors in media art and digital culture to embark on an artistic research. Each episode focuses on an event or development from the history of media arts in the region NRW, Germany. The first episode focuses on the exhibition “Reservate der Sehnsucht” by HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, which took place in 1998 in Dortmund and presented 30 international artistic positions. Some of the images in “Just want you to be” are direct references on the works of the exhibition.

credits:
Ale Bachlechner: script, camera, editing
Jonathan Kastl: sound mixing
Julian Prießen: music
Olivia Platzer: artistic assistance

presented online at medienwerk.NRW