Wir sind zart.
“Wir sind zart zu uns selbst” (we are tender to ourselves) evolves from the writing and gestures of Self-Help, Self-Optimization and Team-Building discourses of our time.
If you want to take a closer look at neoliberal culture, you might find it in this archive: The many hours of good advice and overburdened appellations that make up the genre of coaching videos and literature.
“Wir sind zart zu uns selbst” uses this archive for its monologues and stages it in the concentrated setting of a group session.
This setting of the film, where people get together in a kind of supervision or team-building workshop refers to a kind of togetherness in which affection and mutual acceptance is professionalized and becomes a kind of performative trope. A choreography of social integration.
The video tries to render this dynamic in a single setting: The camera is constantly turning around it’s own axis and the performers have to subordinate to this movement. Does it represent the gaze of the group onto the individual or is it some sort of internalised perfectionist observer?
Max Hilsamer is based in Berlin, Germany.
Max Hilsamer lives and works as an artist and filmmaker in Berlin.
He studied fine arts and experimental film at the University of the Arts Berlin and in the Master of Fine Arts program at Parsons the New School for Design in New York.
His artistic work is about re-reading and re-staging archives and historical events – which gaps in a narrative become visible and which interrelationships can be told with the material?
His works take the form of video installations, photo series, docu-fictions and video essays.