Paula Hildebrandt
Paula Hildebrandt is a Berlin-based artist whose work comprises the fields of writing, film and photography.
Another Sônia
For three weeks in November of 2023, Paula Hildebrandt lives in Rio de Janeiro as Sônia Silk, the main character of the lm »Copacabana, Mon Amour« (1970), one of the most radical experiments of Brazilian cinema. Sônia dreams to become a singer on National Radio, and makes money as a sex-worker for gringos. In her work clothes, silver pumps and a red satin dress, she walks around the streets, hills and black magic ritual sites, among dwellers, pedestrians and ghosts of the city.
“Before, hunger stopped my thinking. Now, it makes me think, not about me nor the spirits of my lovers but about the hunger of other unfortunate people on earth. The planet must be transformed by violence, this stupid, vagrant, errant planet.“
(…) Tired of seeing God’s face at 110°F in the shade, these were the last words of Sonia Silk, Miss Prado Júnior; and another Sônia began.
ANOTHER SÔNIA is a new work that takes up where previous ones left o , that quotes from them directly, and restructures them in another medium. No reenactment, a resurrection. No masquerade like a blonde wig or makeup look, however dressed in an appropriately slinky dress and a ashy haircut, Paula/another Sônia explores the shifting boundaries between art and life, the self and the other, harsh social realities and o ensive arti ciality. To document the collisions of fact and ction, daily encounters and spiritual experiences, she keeps a journal. What can her appearances as peroxide muse, avenging angel, living ghost do for the purpose of these people generally considered to occupy marginal, contentious social positions?
ANOTHER SÔNIA combines art and research, theory and practice, a series of micro-actions and personal re ections that resonate with multiple aspects of urban space – the sensory, spiritual, historical, imaginary, material, political. It is an extensive exercise in translation between curiosity and urgency, language and gesture, across cultures and geographical distance, critically re ecting her own body (politics): white, European, cisgender. In collaboration with Adriana Schneider Alcure, artist, dramaturg and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), the project entails a joint seminar. Together we will cause some scenes, experimental situations, a series of speculative stagings and ashing urban publics. What remains is a work, neither theory, nor ction, but a very personal account as well as collective memories of eeting scenes and characters of Rio de Janeiro in November 2023. Within the framework of post-colonial inequality of power, the prevailing geopolitics of knowledge, ANOTHER SÔNIA is an experiment of (new) new narrative forms of storytelling, addressing issues of framing, representation, integrity and manipulation.
The journal including diary entries, news, op-eds, essays, theory bits, dialogues, fragments, notes on methods (lingering, hanging around, ummoxing, props, escamou age), as well as documentary photo and video material, will be published by EECLECTIC – Digital Publishing for Visual Culture (eeclectic.de).
Atemlos in Wuppertal
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Du machst Party, wir das Outfit. Guter Geschmack muss nicht teuer sein! Der Kobold Bodenstaubsauger VT300 kehrt alles. Auch unter den Teppich. Bitte Seiteneingang benutzen. Sag »Hi« zum neuen SUPER WLAN. Beweg dich schlau! Beim Aufheben schwerer Gegenstände: In die Knie gehen, gerader Rücken. Mach mit! Stromsparen für’s Klima. Zieh dich warm an. LOLLITESTS FÜR KINDER. Letzte Teststation vor dem Hauptbahnhof. Nervenkitzel gefällig? Willkommen in Wuppertal!
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Barmen, Elberfeld, Wichlinghausen und Vohwinkel sind vier Stadtteile von Wuppertal. Die Stadt hat ein starkes Armuts- und Reichtumsgefälle. Es fällt von West nach Ost: Vom Briller Viertel über die Steinbecker Meile auf Oberbarmen und Heckinghausen. […]
Fünf Tage Wuppertal in 23 Fragmenten, Miniaturen, Strophen – ein Langgedicht. ATEMLOS IN WUPPERTAL ist der Versuch, die sogenannte Gegenwart in Wort und Bild festzuhalten, eine angemessene, adäquate, irgendwie passende Sprache, einen Sound und Rhythmus zu finden. Wahrnehmung in Text übersetzen. Worte und Bilder als Werkzeug der Bestandsaufnahme. Kopfkino, Gedankenmusik.
Die Erzählbewegung ist weniger argumentativ denn assoziativ: ein Crossover aus Prosa und Sachtext, verschiedene Textsorten – Dialogfetzen, Reportage, Rap, Sonett, lexikalische Ausflüge, Liedtexte, selbst erfundene Witze, Werbeslogans, Zeitungsmeldungen – werden zusammenführt, jenseits oder an den Rändern der Mitteilbarkeit, sprachlicher Konventionen und Genrebezeichnungen, die sich ohnehin zunehmend auflösen.
Erschienen in: Bettina Paust / Katharina Weisheit (Hg.)
Performance transformieren. Covid-19 und die Digitalisierung des Wuppertaler Beuys-Performancefestivals
Link zur Verlagsseite
Welcome City
Sommer 2015: Paula Hildebrandt begibt sich auf die Suche nach einer Sprache, um die Realität einer diversen Stadtgesellschaft in ihrem alltäglichen Irrsinn, ihrer verwirrenden Schönheit und Widersprüchlichkeit zu beschreiben. In ihren Erkundungen befasst sie sich mit dem Ankommen und Bleiben, mit Fragen nach Zugehörigkeit, den Grenzen und Ambivalenzen deutscher Willkommenskultur. Sie gerät in Konflikt mit Bürokratien und Behörden, prüft das Verhältnis zwischen Gastfreundschaft und bürgerschaftlichem Engagement. Dabei testet sie künstlerische Forschungsmethoden als Experimentalsystem: Einsickern, Escamouflage, Mikro-Aktionen als kleinste Verschiebungen in den Gewissheiten des Alltags. Es zeigt sich: Die Welcome City ist kein intellektueller Ort, kein politisches Programm, keine Fiktion und auch keine Utopie, sondern eine Stadt, die erst in der Begegnung erfahrbar wird.
In Texten und Bildern erzählt das Buch von persönlichen Erfahrungen in Hamburg zwischen 2015 und 2017. Empirisches und Spekulation, Fakt und Fiktion vermischen sich. Das Buch ist für all jene interessant, die nach künstlerischen Perspektiven und performativen Anordnungen in der Willkommensstadt suchen.
Format: Softcover
ISBN: 9783943253566
Seiten: 144
Größe: 22 × 12 × 1 cm
Bindung: Klebebindung
Link zur Verlagsseite
Logistics of Paradise
„One paradise understood helps us understand all other paradises better.“
– Eudora Welty
Logistics of Paradise is a mixture between road movie and essay film that follows two German artists/researchers/tourists along their journey to find out how this place called paradise actually works. The island of Crete, here, functions as an emblematic paradise, allowing its histories to become allegories that explore how landscapes and societies are shaped by desire and displacement, memories, the written, the imagined and its confrontation with reality. Logistics of Paradise suggests links between global supply chains and its local reveberrations, placing them in conversation with mythology, dreams and fantasies. Combining documentary material, re-enactment and surreal scenes, the film stands for the new genre of real life games. The idea is for the spectator to start investigating their own implication in the tourist industries, the commodification of natural resources, and alternatives of a destructive capitalist economy. A bikini, a golfclub, bread, water and oil – which goods and services are essential? Who takes care of this place when you are gone and until you come back? Can you fabricate fun and pleasure? How to enter / leave the “wow bubble“? And how to deal with the constant threat and pain of loss?
“[…] Paula Hildebrandt's Crete film "Logistics of Paradise" gives the evening after research overkill and inspired networking performance a deeper dimension at the end. "Logistics of Paradise" is a documentation of a water-intensive tourism industry in a drying landscape, which is not only frightening, but also roaringly funny over long stretches..“ Nachtkritik by Falk Schreiber, 16th January 2020.
VIDEO, Full HD, 19:28 min
With: Nikos Doulgeraki, Henrik Engdahl, Moritz Frischkorn, Paula Hildebrandt, Giorgia Kipraki, Irini Spinthaki
Montage: Anna Fiedler
Sound Design: Katharina Pelosi
Production: The Great Report – Kampnagel Hamburg, Elbkulturfonds Hamburg
Link zu The Great Report
Performing Citizenship. Bodies, Agencies, Limitations
Realities and concepts of citizenship have changed radically throughout history and will keep changing. Today, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, new articulations of citizenship emerge in citizen’s and non-citizen’s practices and struggles, and they often do so in conjunction with artistic practices. In these struggles and practices, citizenship is embodied and changed; new forms of togetherness, new strategies to claim rights and new civic roles are tested and rehearsed.
Edited by Paula Hildebrandt, Kerstin Evert, Sibylle Peters, Mirjam Schaub, Kathrin Wildner, Gesa Ziemer.
Palgrave Macmillan, Part of the book series: Performance Philosophy.
Open Access.
Link zur Verlagsseite
Berlin Barricades
Berlin September 2019. The “Filmbühne Wien“ does not exist anymore. Netflix and television have swallowed most of the countless cinemas now turned into flagship stores and supermarkets. Who on earth is this clown running around the city, posing like a ghost with a white table cloth and who is this women in a black dress, unintentionally limping? Who’s giving instructions to whom? Berlin Barricades weaves my own family story with the history of my home town Berlin, the vanished cinemas, the ‚Stolpersteine‘ (stumbling stones to commemorate local mostly jewish residents killed by the Nazis), the Victory Column ‚Goldelse‘ and the ‚Funkturm‘ (Berlin Radio Tower), to a personal narrative about the Berlin of the 2020s.
Video, MPEG, 4 min
With: Micha Bonk, Paula Hildbrandt
Photography: Michal Ebert Hanke
Tribute to: Ulrike Ottinger Production: Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Filmworkshop “Berlin Calligrams“
auf YouTube ansehen
The Guest
In May 2017 Paula Hildebrandt invited a guest to stay with her for two weeks, and the camera goes on when the proverbial elephant enters the room. How to accommodate and communicate with a radically different being that language cannot reach? Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives, and what makes for a life worth grievance and protection? Are you ready to share your room with a stranger? The Guest is a non-naturalistic mise-en-scène, an enacted allegory, a very personal film which uses different means of production: a material object, photography, a Go Pro, voice-over and a balcony as urban stage. Nothing was planned or rehearsed, when suddenly this thing called ‘art' starts to happen.
GER 2020, Video, mp4, 18:21 min
Text: Paula Hildebrandt
Voice: Britta Steffenhagen
Camera: Rebecca Wall, Robert Stürzl
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