LEER

LEER
photographer: Marie Samrotzki
A research into spaces and practices of escape, which provide Millenials alternate realities to environmental, social and cultural devastations

Jeannette Petrik
Enschede, the Netherlands
About
I'm an interdisciplinary artist who situates their practice within spaces of collectivity and challenges structures of dominance.
Links
Field of work
Multimedia, Curating, Communication, Research, Other
Project category
Raising awareness
Project submitted
2024

Born in Berlin in 1988, I explore spaces of collectivity and structures of dominance using text, sound, performance and the organising of events of doubt and dialogue as central mediums and research tools. As a cultural producer, I value the exploration of subjectivities and am interested in the concept and notion of noise as an analytical design principle. As a non-white, non-binary person, my own experiences of exclusion and identity often inform my work. I value doubt, disruption and solidarity as central social values.

I studied at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London and at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. I'm an active member of German and Dutch DIY cultural scenes and perform with the soundart project Chebedajha. Since 2021, I'm a member of the New Centre for Research and Practice. In September 2022, the opera 'To Fall Safely' premiered at the National Theatre of Brunswick, Germany, for which I collaboratively wrote the libretto together with Katharina Kern.


We are millennials in our mid-30's. Our youthful, general enthusiasm has slowly but surely fizzled out. Our lives are dominated by working and paying bills, shopping, cooking, and filing taxes; while the environment is slipping into catastrophe, while suffering, violence and destruction dominate societies and their systems of oppression. We are overwhelmed, overstimulated, anxious and paralysed: Generation Y, the "burnout generation". We used to have high expectations of ourselves, but feel let down: the promise "you just have to work hard enough..." has not brought us anywhere. Instead: Precarity, helplessness, loss of control, overwhelm, and this all-encompassing sense of futility. It almost feels like we're still depressed teenagers, only now we're in the bodies of adults. We can't keep pretending to be productive. We are breaking under the pressure of the system. Our emotional capacities are exhausted.

LEER is about a feeling that offers spaces of retreat in parallel realities, which tears us apart and inspires us at the same time. What does this feeling do to us? And how does it affect our lives?

The project collects stories and narratives of individual and collective parallel worlds. It works with language and sound, which will be processed into a cross-over of scenic performance and sound art.
The project offers a collective playground for questioning boundaries, a space where media, people and themes meet.