Elise’s Swissness (what a tongue twister) is hard to pinpoint, maybe because it has been partly obscured by her London years (or her years in Barcelona or New York). Since she moved to Berlin a couple of months ago (after we both had spent some time in the waltzing city of Vienna), I have become aware of an accumulation of Lausanne expats that seems to be constantly hosting lovely dinners or performances consisting of picnics and sunny afternoons. Elise seems to be immediately surrounded by a large gang of fabulous friends and collaborators in every city she goes. She is a freelance curator, artist, writer – in itself an act of constant defiance against the forces of economics and pragmatism – and is one of the most productive people I know, despite or maybe because of the dinners and picnics. Collaboration and communal thought are at the centre of her endeavours. She is massively committed to her work, to people, ideas, and I hugely admire her sensibility. She gets up at ungodly hours in the morning and makes poker-face fun of me sometimes for being constantly anxious. Once she told me about a conversation she had with an ex-lover in the bathtub that changed her life, because she realised that she could be whoever she wanted to be.
Since March 2014, Elise Lammer is artist-in-residence in Marfa, Texas. Together with French artist Pauline Beaudemont, she is currently conducting a research on the city’s mystic and subconscious history. She also plans to kill an old pair of Chelsea boots while hiking through the desert.

I first met Brittani Sonnenberg in 2081. In the stuffy dark attic under the roof of the Kunst-Werke in Berlin she was reading a text on retro-future for Georg’s and Christopher’s congress “What happened in 2081?” while downstairs other members of the gang were collecting an archaeology of what was to come (little did we know).

Brittani used to play basketball with the guys like a boss but never allowed me to come and cheer. She sometimes speaks with a Southern drawl, and sometimes, speaking English, she slips into German and unconsciously invents new idioms which have their origin and place somewhere in between languages. She also speaks Mandarin, sort of. Brittani is at home in many places, she was born in Hamburg and has lived in Philadelphia, London, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Shanghai, Singapore, Boston, Phnom Penh, Ann Arbor and now Berlin. She informed me that she graduated from high school in Singapore, “so that’s where the ‘growing up’ part stops.” We have had many conversations about growing up, about home, about being foreign, and about our dystopian visions of our futures with cute little Neo-Mormons running all over the hologram lawn (her words). She is, as you can see, a writer. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The O’Henry Prize Stories 2008, Asymptote, Ploughshares, Time Magazine, as part of the Berlin Stories and elsewhere. I am incredibly curious about her novel Home Leave which is going to be published in 2014.

Sometimes she looks like an Andy Warhol superstar.