Leonie Brandner

I explore the fleeting feeling of being part of an unstable system through large-scale installations, texts, songs and performances. The starting points of many of my projects are objects, plants, or stories that have ties into ancient history yet somehow have lost their context. They are mementos, traces, and vestiges of something bigger that no longer exists: ghosts of an ancient past, aliens in this day and age. I try to give these artefacts, these stories, new contexts, new ways of being in this world. I see my work as a way to weave cosmologies: I tie personal stories to ecological themes and myths and histories to create delicate vessels for fragile orders that shimmer, vibrate and remain in constant motion.

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I believe in life, as in art, the only constant is change. I am interested in how we understand our bodies as part of a larger system of past and future times, and with that, ideas around botany and health emerged as part of my work. Health is interesting to me, not in the sense of personal health but as an indicator of our bodily exchange, our being influenced and in turn influencing each other and everything around. Our world, our surroundings, is constantly adapting, digesting, distorting, enveloping, and overriding, and it is my ambition to give a voice to this constant state of flux with my work. Taking this line of thought as a method for my work, I have been experimenting with performance, especially live singing, and its documentation. This resulted in pieces that are malleable and layered, that feature both live elements and echoes of what has been and could be once more in the future.