For the 2020 online edition of Liste, Sweetwater presents a new body of work by Berlin-based artist Luzie Meyer. Using text, image, voice, and music as compositional material, Meyer analyzes the human condition, psychological states, and linguistic logic. Often beginning with or inspired by a written text, her work subverts typical narrative structures through wordplay, self-referentiality, and absurdity.

Incognito Ergo Non Sum (2020), a new film, takes as its starting point a typical artist interview. The film is filled with half-truths drawn from personal experiences and encounters, though they are scattered amongst falsehoods and exaggerations. While a pseudo “new classical” soundtrack drives the rhythm of the interview, the dialogue devolves into a theater of absurdity, confounding the characters’ notions of their own public, professional, and private lives as they explain strategies of personal image management. As in much of Meyer’s work, the characters are played by amateur actors, counteracting the rigid nature of a script with the arbitrary nature of unskilled idiosyncrasy. Produced alongside Incognito Ergo Non Sum is a series of photographs, as seen in the film, depicting the amateur actors in the process of reading their scripts.

A key reference for the film was Thomas Nagel’s 1998 essay “Concealment and Exposure”, in which he argues for the protection of private space and laments moral outrage generated by private choices; perhaps it serves as a template for how to assess these characters as their flaws and virtues are exposed through a barrage of close-up images and film clips. The multimedia-based construction of their personas also reflects the tension of how representation and reality can both align and diverge.

Also produced for Liste is the final work presented, Pin Up Hang Up (2020). Meyer wrote the poem in response to a commission – a typed version is currently on view on billboards in Basel as part of an exhibition – but has created a hand-written version on self-made paper for offer.