The Symbiotic Approach / Carmen Westermeier & Julia Hainz
Baden Württemberg – Catalunya Exchange Grant
September - October 2024
The Symbiotic Approach, which is the artist duo Julia Hainz and Carmen Westermeier, started working together already in 2014. At a very early stage, they started working with different media to challenge social questions with a feminist approach. Over the last 10 years, they have refined their practice in multiple exhibitions and performances, residencies, and through continuous joint research.
As transdisciplinary artists, their practice covers a wide range of media, including photography, performance art, video, sound, and virtual reality. They often work with site-specific installations to create an immersive experience. Their installations can be read as temporary societies in which visitors can act as performers, and in terms of content, they primarily investigate the interweaving of different social, cultural, and political discourses and how these interact to shape our understanding of identity, physicality, and society. They are particularly interested in how these discourses are shaped in the present and history and how it can be reinterpreted and deconstructed. Through their artistic research, they are able to integrate different perspectives and forms of knowledge and gain new insights that are relevant not only to their own work but also to society as a whole.
One focus of Hainz and Westermeier lies on normative processes and demonstrations that discourses about the body are discourses of power occupation that are often characterized by sexist, racist, and classist implications. The multiple discriminations of bodies are reflected in the capitalist image of the performance body, which is often characterized by instructions on how much they adapt or self-optimize, which must conform to a certain assigned aesthetic. One constant is the starting point of their own body, whereby they often unfold autobiographical narratives and still put their fingers in the structural wound; in this context, it should also be said that the reading of our bodies denotes a discourse carried by several fields that comes together through the overdetermination of traditional standardizations. Thereby, they see themselves in the performance art history where the body has always been a political instrument to deconstruct the social anti-figure and transform it into a new aesthetic.
