The very specific frameworks that we unconsciously built around us like spiders build their nets, fine, almost invisible, became our own traps. With which light and mirrors can we make these spider webs of projection visible? Former liberating promises of self-responsibility, creativity and freedom have turned into a new immaterial invisible (bio power) self-executed control mechanism over our private spheres, and we are not able anymore to distinguish our private self from our public self. The public self has become the intimate self: our body, our sensitivity and our emotions are under our own permanent control. Is our life an artwork or a Facebook page? The constant imperative to create and display ourselves is nearly inescapable.

Aesthetization is considered to be a way of substituting substance with appearance, real issues with superficial image-making. But what is the substance? Does authenticity exist? What is an original? Isn‘t everything a copy, or the development of something one has seen or read? A collective utopia that is created in one‘s head out of the imagination of everything that has been there or has been seen or even dreamt, the collective mythologies? Our context is a 3-dimensional multilayered web that we build industriously choosing unconsciously the next material of this complex collage.

What is it that drives our choices?

Instead of accepting the multiplicity and diversity of being, there seems to be a need for fixation. We are stuck and clogged by our phantasies, self-positioning and ideologies. How to redefine symbols, letters and images with new meaning, how to use our language and myth system without being chained by it? Not to judge, not to divide and not to classify.

Our task is too stay as long as possible in the precariousness of the inter. Reconciling and oscillating between our doubts and desires, feeling the movement of the net, us in-between. It lies in the preceding expectations of the beholder what is perceived. The problem is not to perceive real as real and fake as fake but to apply to them a hierarchical positioning. By understanding and experiencing opposites as multiple perspectives and completion instead of a dualistic stubbornness we can detach ourselves from limiting concepts and access the full spectrum of creation. If the spectacle is our god we shall recognize its potential! The hieroglyphs of our contemporary life can be divine mediums that inform us and transcend the limited frame we call reality.

Fake reinvents reality.

What was projected on us, and what we projected on ourselves can become our material to work with. We can start by using language and form not as definitions and functions but as symbols and organisms. By exaggerating social rituals in order to make them acknowledged as such. We can play with our visual appearance and let the instability of it carry us along. After we said goodbye to beliefs and accepted that there is no certainty we have to learn to use language in an undefined way and perceive symbols and images through their being. In times when the definition of illusion has become the meaning of reality we have to reconsider how we want to perceive reality. When it seems that any kind of counter movement is eaten up immediately by the monster that creates ideology and defines communication, we have to find new ways of occupying. Instead of moving against we can move within. Being eaten by and eating the enemy. Over-identification and anthroprophagy that leads to an orgiastic exaggeration in order to re-occupy the images and words that describe and mold our reality. The corps, corroded by worms from the inside organically looses its fixed shape and becomes an ever changing collective organism.

By changing the form we get in touch with the material. By disguising and displacing contextual identified symbols we intervene in the clogged language of our perception. Imitation explains us the language of the original. The caricature is more precise than the portrait.

I need a make-over. Put a wig on and shut the fuck up.

And in that process there doesn’t seem to be a clear good or bad, good taste, or responsible choice-taking.

No because this puts a lot of pressure on yourself, but also on others. This is where prejudice starts. Instead of saying what the good ‘thing’ is, the thing people should embrace or think, it is much more confrontational to really confront yourself with what is there, not to censor it.

Lili does appear under a certain aesthetics though, an aesthetics that emphasizes somehow the things you do not allow yourself to embrace, a kind of aesthetics of bad taste.

Yes because Lili takes the commercial image and tries to turn it into a healing system. And it makes fun of the aesthetics of the arts, of good taste, of the fear of embarrassing yourself. What is that arty intellectual image that I create around myself? For me it is no different from the commercial image. People hate that, and I understand. But it is important: why should I invest myself so much in the production of an aesthetics when there are so many commercial aesthetic models around I could just use. Why not turn things around and copy the commercial.

There has been quite a lot of historical references in art history to these kinds of commercial displacements. In pop art, for example. Just thinking about the Campbell soup can._

Yes, but the problem is that most of these practices still play in a genius economy of the arts. And are in that sense very egotistic. Ethics for me are important: how I work with people, how I make sure not to instrumentalize them. I want to create an experience in which the people are the stars. Off course there is an ambiguity in the experience, but I really want to make people feel good. Not shock them, I don’t want to be violent. Somehow you use these strategies, to turn the art experience into a therapeutic one. How do I bring these different strands together: the use of commercial imagery and strategies in the arts scene, and the therapeutic moment of criticality? My starting point was to use something that is suffocating you in order to liberate yourself. And now I have to say I try to develop a visual language that is different from the commercial. From the commercial to the fantastic, the surreal. But off course this is a very broad area. And people seem to connect the same kind of situations to all kinds of images: of films of the 1970’s to 1990’s.

But is this not because these fields of phantasmatic potential are often situated in your childhood or teenage years. So people that grew up in the 1980’s or 1990’s, see these images as iconic not only for a certain age, but also as reference points in the construction of their ‘self’?

Maybe the therapeutic aspect borrowed from commercial strategies is that the visuals always have to remind you of something and that, through this reminder, you make a connection. In this case, between yourself and the media images that ‘formed’ you: movies, series, ... That is what I want to happen, because you create these connections, I didn’t put them there, and this tells you something about your projections and backgrounds. It’s making these connections visible, all these images you use to construct your selves. It’s a nice idea that your sense of self has been projected into you, through the movie projector, and now you’re projecting it out again. So you are just a piece of media. Yes, and in the ‘help center’ we try to cleanse you somehow. It is a way of protesting the invasion of the private space and the self. To pause this bombardment of values, of self-responsibilization, especially in a work environment. Not only managers, but also their secretaries become responsible for their work as a creative project. And this is very much part of a neo-liberal system of value-creation, that puts a lot of pressure on people, invading their private sphere, how they see yourself. There IS no privacy anymore, the constant imperative is… work.

Yes, I see a parallel now between the physical make-over that pushes the idea of the makeability of the self to the edge, and the promise of the neo-liberal life in which you can make over every singel detail of your profile self, your relations, your house, …

And believing in it! In that process of projection and construction you grow completely alienated, detached from another kind of being. There is so much invested in projections and fantasies, that people seem to be unaware that their ego’s are taking over. And this is what in the end constitutes a society that is filled with people that live solely on the strength of their projections and identity confirmations.

So what you offer is a kind of homeopathy: you give people even more opportunity to transform themselves, to revel in the pleasure of it, as a kind of purging experience? To physically experience how deep these projections have been implanted in our bodies, and then somehow let this realization transform you.

Yes, and then to realize at the end that what you thought before was very important has become irrelevant. It is a kind of therapy because we use some therapeutic attributes to make you understand that there is something to be done here. It is not offering a solution, the solution you have to find yourself.