Klaubert & Kussatz Talk Social Media, Rise of Marginalized Communities and Berlin Club Culture
Video: Klaubert & Kussatz, beatricealive, 2019.
Image: Klaubert & Kussatz, Falling Rock Performance at A&O Kunsthalle Leipzig, 2019.
Alexander Klaubert and Francis Kussartz formed an audio-visual performance project called Klaubert & Kussatz. Accompanied by a minimalistic installation of utensils, a sound system, and their bodies, these three essential elements are used by the duo to reconstruct their identity and to raise questions about “the self” as an object while referring to their past, present, and future.
"Our way of creating works is intuitive, based on experienced, released, or held back emotions.” Says Klaubert & Kussatz. “This is also how our sound collages are experienced - it lives within the dialogues."
Klaubert, a student of the Media Art program at the HGB – Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, and Kussatz, a student of Time-Based Media at HFBK - Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg, have been examining notions of gender and identity for several years. The two met in Berlin in 2015, during a time in their lives where they both didn’t know what they wanted to do with themselves. As time passed, their friendship grew, and they started supporting each other’s projects.
In 2018 the two founded "Law of Life", a queer feminist artist collective. The collective was born with the mission to form a community of creators, where they can exchange ideas, collaborate, and support each amid the struggles queer people often face.
Video: Alexander Klaubert, Female Fighters, 2017
Their work is influenced by social media, protest activism, the rise of marginalized communities, Berlin’s club culture and underground scene, and especially, the history of their home country, Germany. Klaubert & Kussatz both grew up in East Germany (former GDR), after the fall of the Berlin wall. Both of their parents had a socialist upbringing, and although the GDR no longer existed, and they both grew up in a capitalist state, their parents' upbringing was, to some extent, reflected in theirs.
“Some things were easier for us, many things we had to learn by ourselves because our family had no experience with the western lifestyle,” Klaubert & Kussatz said. “The frustration and depression that developed for many in the East of Germany in the '90s shaped us. That also often reflects our need for equality, social justice, and self-empowerment in our work.”
Image: Francis Kussatz, Saskia - Cleansing, 2018, still from video.
The two follow the philosophy that art doesn’t have to be just a painting, a sculpture, or an installation. To them, art is a combination of all areas of life, forms of expression, and experienced impressions further processed, reassembled. They recognize that their identities “form not only them but also yours”.
Their video works are constructed of real-life scenarios embedded in stage scenes, captured by a phone camera. The combination of the two represents the duality of the self, what we project to the world, and what we hide from society. They describe their sound, throughout their collaborative work, as a mix sound collage, influenced by techno, noise, and pop music, which are the pillars of the queer nightlife scenes in Europe.
“It is always at the interface between lived reality and felt reality. Subjectivity and apparent objectivity that can never be fully achieved.” Says Klaubert & Kussatz. “We take on the role of the narrators and are the protagonists ourselves, so documentation and staged scenes become blurred. Just as our memory cannot reproduce every detail truthfully.”
