Catalogue > At random

"Jamais-vu is the opposite of déjá vu. A place that is actually familiar is perceived as foreign, she heard." An essay about coastlines and plants: LANDEN follows its protagonist on her botanical journey from the Wadden Sea to the coast of Lebanon. She collects material for her herbarium and witnesses the economic collapse and political instability in Lebanon. On fragile terrain, plants such as the Queller, the Milk Thistle, or the Crimson Cylinder Wiper navigate us to the banks of the Beirut River, to a growing micro-forest between urban highways, or along modernist architectures in Tripoli (northern Lebanon). Thus, the flora tells of adaptation and change, of resilience and feared change, of hyperinflation and deserted places.

Vanessa Nica Mueller works as a artist, independent film director, editor and producer in the field of art films and documentary formats in Hamburg. In her films she deals with questions about memory, the human being in relation to urban space and nature, the uncanny and the cinematic construction of inner conditions, as well as with the tension between identity and alienation. She spans the arc from inner navigations to third spaces. In her artistic research on fragile ecosystems, she is interested in the intersection of external and internal climatic changes, crisis and transformation. Starting from the documentary approach, she creates essay films that, at the interface between staging and observation always contain an openness. She focuses on an essayistic and associative narrative style and combines digital digital film material with analog footage. Her short films PLATEAU, Halbe Nacht and Traces of an Elephant screened at renowned festivals in and outside Europe and were also presented in the context of exhibitions. Her film Traces of an Elephant has been requested several times as teaching material in connection with film analysis and the Northern Ireland conflict. For research over the years she has spent longer periods in Uganda, Southern France, Northern Ireland, Israel, and in 2018 on a Goethe Institute fellowship to Lebanon. Vanessa Nica Mueller studied film and time-based media at the Academy of Fine Arts Hamburg. Besides the realization of her own films, she works as a lecturer in the field of film education.