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Sandra Bartoli
by
Hilmar Schmundt
People

Some people say that Sandra grew up in the Dolomites, could ski before she could walk and studied architecture and landscape architecture in Italy, the US and Germany. Little do they know. Sandra comes from the future, that’s all you need to know. Everyone feels at home somewhere, and for Sandra that somewhere is tomorrowland. Her nostalgia for the future started early. When she read A la recherche du temps perdu as a teenager, that lost time was, of course: the future. Her favorite movies: Blade Runner, Donnie Darko and Repo Man. When she studied the 400 year old villas of Andrea Palladio in Venice, she saw it as an archaeology of possible tomorrows. Here’s the thing: She reads spaces like novels. Her architecture is always about telling stories – often like a garden of forking paths, with multiple contradictory plot lines. She runs a thinktank together with Silvan Linden, they call it Büro für Konstruktivismus. That name might seem like a nod to the hyper rationalist belief of the twenties in utopian urban planning. It could be half ironic, half serious. Which half is which is sometimes hard to tell. Their exhibition “La Zona” depicted failed cityscapes in all their sublime ugliness: Empty parking lots, failed high rises, the disasterscape of Tchernobyl. Blade Runner is more than a movie, it is a mindset: I want more life, fucker. Need a travel guide for the future? Get Sandra’s and Silvan’s magazine called “Die Planung”. One of their issues is dated 2036. Not a bad start for futurophiliacs. Another issue is dated 2048. But even that era for Sandra might already seem a little outdated. There must be a more futuristic tomorrow somewhere just around the corner, she might think: This particular future seems so… 2048!

Marcia Farquhar
People

She reminds one of the black-haired girl from the café in Lindsay Anderson’s film “If…”, holding a machine gun and shooting from the cathedral’s roof of the university at the fleeing professors below.

Marcia Farquhar burns endlessly. A star on rocks brought by the mothership emerging from Earth’s incendiary core. Artist and performer by trade and vocation, she never stops: life, imagination, impromptu and stage blur in one stream of time. She is always right on, whatever the situation she provokes or stumbles into. Her performances are open, perhaps even open-ended, shape-shifters, meteopathic, and engaging like a feast or a funeral.

It has been suggested that her acts have the candid, coruscating quality of punkishness, consciously approximating a level of training, be that flamenco dance, fashion catwalk, psychoanalysis or tour guiding, in a “self-assured amateurism”. This is why the beauty she gives out is never cold. Raw and infectious, her work reaches interstitial places that sizzle. And immediately everything is throbbing, humorous, uncomfortable and disinhibiting; crevasses of truth are opening, flashing at everyone, for an instant. Her metaphors are pulling at the realities she knows so well: high bohemia and bourgeoisie, domestic and institutional lures and horrors, different generations forced in the same piece of clothing, stardom, loneliness, loveliness, ridicule and fame.

Her work, if not in real time, can be also viewed in Marcia Farquhar’s 12 Shooters, where 14 artists shot her performances in 12 critical acts and contributions to the book.

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Sandra Bartoli