Lena Longefay
lenalongefay.hotglue.me, instagram.com/lenalongefay, longefaylena@gmail.com
Lena Longefay (she/her) considers her practice as a composition, a constant research process of shaping and sharing. Interested in feminist doings, she plays with religious, domestic, pop culture or institutional representations. Subverting and destabilizing them she aims at activating antifascist perspectives of community making. She is currently reflecting on friendships as transformative micropolitical relationships, generating communities where art making makes sense. She works with installations gathering sculptures, writings, found images, drawings, sounds, objects that sometimes are animated though lecture performances.
Currently based in The Hague
Graduation Project
wood, video, sound, aluminium, clay, beads, nylon thread, paper, fabric, cardboard, bread, brioche and cookies of joy.
“Less than 8000 a year” is an installation merging different mediums and works. Considered as a composition, the work evolves around the “Manifesto for the Appropriation of our Own Creativity”, an archive from the Italian feminist collective Le Nemesiache written in 1977. Encountering this writing touched me deeply, some of its paragraphs felt like a description of my own practice and ideas about art making. Using this feeling of recognition and following an inclusive feminist approach, I decided to write a variation of the text, applying it to the current artistic and economical context I find myself in as a young art graduate. Thinking about the analogy of emerging artists and the not yet emerging ones led me to generate the status of submergence as a place to be and to be doing from.
After that, the installation started to grow organically and many elements followed on a serpentine table. Sculptures of sand casted drawings in aluminium held by pieces of bread or braided brioche, a sound piece of voices singing together paragraphs of Le Nemesiache’s manifesto as well as a video and ceramics work reflecting on ideas of abundance, inspired by a roof details from the painting “The Netherlandish Proverbs” by Peter Bruegel the Elder.
Following logics of togetherness, politics of movement, embodied and shared knowledge through feminist traditions, the work is a celebration of friendships and makings but also aims to be a reflection of economics of failure and precariousness.
wood, video, sound, aluminium, clay, beads, nylon thread, paper, fabric, cardboard, bread, brioche and cookies of joy.
FERMENTING AFFINITIES
Thesis
This publication addresses the question of friendships as a way of becoming political. It is a collection of different thoughts, composing with anecdotal, theoretical, conversational and poetical thinking, reflecting on how friendships are activated within given circumstances. Focusing on feminist practices of writing and talking, the writing evolves to the importance of connections and communities among young artists and practitioners. Bringing to a focus affinities, gifts and joy. The thesis is divided into four parts: "One in a rhythm several in different rhythms", "Friendships as a relational economy", "Micropolitics of a language beyond control" and "Prolific fermentations and cross-pollinations".