POSTER ARTWORK BLASTOGENESE X
Conrad Veit left andCharlotte Maria Kätzl right_Selbstportrait mit Selbstauslöser © Kätzl Veit 2020
Conrad Veit (* 1987, Duisburg/Germany) and Charlotte Maria Kätzl (* 1993, Rosenheim/Germany) are an artist duo who have together developed various film and video works, video installations and photographic works as well as spatial installations since they began studying Fine Arts at the Braunschweig University of Art in 2014. Whether film, photography or installation, Veit and Kätzl‘s works form their own cosmos in which the play with the figurative and the different is in the foreground. A game that creates diversity and confusion and questions the boundaries of the heteronormative and the socially constructed. The duo works multimedia based, combining sculptural elements as well as elements of the costume, which often function as drag to performative stagings that lead to film or photographic works or are further developed in space-related installations.
What inspired you to make the short film Blastogenesis X?
Probably the inspiration was as diverse as the characters in Blastogenesis itself. On the one hand, there is the fascination for film-historical film worlds, be it those of the early silent films, the science fiction B-movies of the 1950s and 60s or the queer film experiments of the New York avant-garde of the 1960s around Jack Smiths, Kenneth Anger & Co. Coupled with the haptics and aesthetics of analog film technology and on the other hand Charlotte‘s costumes and animal attributes, which in themselves have always been a source of inspiration for performance and mise-en-scène, the idea very quickly arose to create a cinematic space that, disguised as a nature documentary, stages naked human bodies performing animal actions in an implied life cycle, in order to create a utopia of the equality of all life, in which attributions around gender as well as animal and human no longer play a role.
How did your collaboration come about?
Probably the first collaboration came about in undergraduate class at the beginning of our liberal arts studies, when an initial documentation of a space-based installation turned into the first film, „Half Sleep,“ and we quickly realized that the combination of Charlotte‘s performance, sculpting, and costume work and Conrad‘s cinematography, directing, sound, and editing work formed a wonderful symbiosis.
What does the term queer mean to you?
For us, queer is an attitude and ascription of identity that allows for all forms of life and identities, while at the same time questioning gender binarity, hetereonormativity and gender roles. For us, being queer means dissolving prefabricated social patterns and structures and rejecting the social compulsion to always clearly define one‘s own gender and sexual orientation. For us, queer is a term whose meaning is constantly being expanded and rethought, and which will hopefully one day no longer require any explanation.
Any favourite queer films/series?
Normal Love by Jack Smith. When we got to see the film a few years ago, there was a deep sense of fulfillment and excitement within us.
More: conrad-veit.com
