The story of Lili

During a hot and dusty summer, in a sweaty night in the bright-lighted mirrored toilet of sin city in Sofia, Lili was born. She came to life as the awareness of comparison between lookalikes and decided soon to manifest her beliefs in several random actions. During her childhood she struggled to become a regular female stereotype and had to face harsh criticism on her female identity construction. Being questioned as a role-model she tried to find ways to confront her audience with their own belief-systems. As a child of the popfolk-culture in bulgaria, she understood that fiction is reality and celebrated emptiness as a potential to be filled. She became a vessel for transformation into hyper-femininity. During this period she discovered that the path into this transformation was the actual goal. Knowing the power of the mask, she became a symbol to confront her audience with their own inherited cultural stereotypes of self-representation and feminine identity.

Lili performed a.o. at Viva la Mittwoch, by Christian Weise, Schauspiel Stuttgart, during Operative Perfomances at HBC Berlin and in collaboration with Voin de Voin and Andrew Fremont-Smith during funeral charade of poses: ein Abend mit Freundinnen und Basso, Hebbel am Ufer 1, Berlin.

where lili comes from

photography: Milen Radev

make over

You can never disappear as long as you are here. You can disappear for yourself, become invisible for yourself. And then the mask can take over. Take you somewhere else. Every time another mask. Exhausting. Don‘t tell us who you are. What are you expecting? From me? From you? I am your audience, and you are mine. We create our reality in this moment together.

I called it Lili. It was like this name had been there already. This entity was here wanting to be recognized. The word: at the same time empty and full of desires, lubricious connotations and a mystic simplicity. A name and a word that can stand for all and nothing. The rhythmic sound can through repetition become a mantra that is emptying out all your contexts and directly connecting you with your doubting desires. Let them possess you by swallowing them into your system. Being afraid and defensive is a normal reaction when your static framework is in danger. Exhaust and exaggerate the social codes that are framing and securing our contacts! Loose your self. Lili out your connotations, and embrace them without judgement. Everything that is perceived is pre-mediated in our imagination. We need space and emptiness to see potential. Emptiness is potential. Doing is perceiving. Help is confrontation. We have to practice active distraction and acceptance.

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.

lili's photo diary

What is Lili doing?

What does Lili teach?

healing the I

You chose to reinterpret the overall term ‘displacement’ as ‘make-over’. In what sense is a make-over a displacement for you?

I chose this term because it concerns a kind of visual shift, a displacement of an image. But of course I also chose the word because it has ‘make’ in it, and it refers to make-up, and it refers to the make-overs of magazines, etc..

When I think about make-over I think about reality TV programs like ‘The Swan’: programs that through a make-over displace people so far out of their ‘normal’ habitat that they hardly look like themselves anymore.

Yes that is true, when your looks gets changed there is indeed a displacement happening in the constitution of the self. You start locating yourself differently, because the outsider’s look upon you has changed. I don’t think it has to do with ‘prettiness’ or ‘ugliness’. I think this displacement happens in all directions whenever you change your appearance.

Looking at your research I would say that what you create is a gap between what you thought you were and what you are becoming in the transformation.

Yes this gap is a moment of contemplation. In that moment you become aware of your self-constructed self. And also you become more conscious of the relation of this self to the outside society that helped you creating it. This constructed self I usually see as a collage. You like this, but also that. A bit of art, a bit of life style. In realizing that you are a construction, you can start to play with it, you don’t have to get attached to this ‘I’.

What happens when you let go of the ‘I’?

This awareness helps you to become more open to other people, less strict, less limited by ideals. Which also limit others. But first you have to cleanse yourself to be able to see it. And in the case of the Lili or the Lilification this cleansing process is a very playful one. It is all about not taking yourself so seriously, about playing with the ‘I’s, all together. To open to the other, to the influences of others, to affect each other. It is a kind of movement against individualism, against this dictate of finding yourself, realizing yourself.

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.

Interview by Elke van Campenhout.

lili tarot

The Lili Tarot is based on the fictional character Lili: the stereotype of the hyper-feminine — femme fatale. The female mask as an act of magic, the seduction and addiction of the ego, the ritual of becoming other as a portal... The game invites the player to contemplate on their own personas, masks and social roles.

lili forever