Race me through, 2023
Biker femme rides her motorbike. She doesn’t want to cry but keeps racing through the night to feel the engine vibrating within every cell of her body.
Milena invites us to bear witness to a feast of wrestling emotions caught in endless cycles of slightly distorted sobbing and the sound of buzzing motors and rain. We might feel empathetic towards the isolated protagonist’s misery, but the computer-generated character’s uncanniness will break any illusion.
Race me through evokes a ghostly presence in that space seems to dissolve through the intertwining of physical, virtual and metaphorical spheres. The TV-screen is not so much understood as a medium of display but rather as an agent marking a specific point in time. It is as if we are sharing the very same dream-like room as the avatars who appear on screen: We all are caught in a maze of non-descriptive landscapes that give little spatial information – a lack that is seemingly mirrored by the avatar’s sense of emotional disorientation. We try to hold on to the clues that are given through the choreography of the protagonist’s interactions. They fall in and out of synch with each other not to create a linear narrative but rather to emulate a constant state of being.
For just an instant, muscle mommy appears in biker femme’s frame – leaned back-to-back as if this is where the lovers belonged: Finally, they are able to breathe, to stop racing through. A fleeting memory to offer a glimpse of respite before the overwhelming sadness comes rushing back when her bodily presence disintegrates.
Through her practice, Milena reflects on questions of our shifting perception due to progressing technologies of digital media: What does the physical presence of a digital character entail?
In Race me through Milena draws on autofictional approaches to dissect trends that are currently driving her very own algorithm of TikTok: Sadcartoks, Sadgymtoks, Sadbikertoks – a micro-universe that is running on its own terms to fathom the idea of melancholic speeding[1].
The tread-mill runner races as if in trance. Less confrontational, she only cries a little bit and keeps running away from us.
Meandering back and forth between crying and speeding, there is no catharsis offered. The 3 female lovers are aching but claim the pain – even if achingly – as a space of their own.
Antonia Rebekka Truninger
[1] Melancholic speeding is a digital phenomenon depicting users who film themselves indulging on heavily working out or excessive driving, usually accompanied by dramatic music and text fragments to emphasize their psychologically unstable states of mind. The temporal linkage suggests that adrenaline leads to catharsis, essentially glorifying capitalist symbols of status or gym culture’s quest for physical perfection. The users who engage with said trends are almost exclusively male presenting, just as the spaces these trends inhabit are still heavily gendered. Taking this into account, to frame sadness as deficiency is to argue that it would cripple their notion of masculinity.
Sound in collaboration with Jasper Simeon Mehler
4 channel UHD-video installation (11’00’’)
Photo credits: Margot Sparkes