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Mark
I KNOW WHAT TO DO
with Lau Lukkarila und Slim Soledad and music by Marshall Vincent
performance / video, 2022/2023

(c) Laura Nitsch

(c) Joesph Kadow


Sunny Pfalzer with Lau Lukkarila, Slim Soledad, I Know What to Do (2022), Performance, as part of Voice Over #2 – A perfomative gathering at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2023;
(c) Eva Hoppe 


Vibing is a structural matter and repetition can be brutal. It is the feeling of a teenager, posing in front of a mirror, with a blush of shame on their pretty face. Not yet in full capacity to grasp the social implications of their creation, but eager to learn. “It is easy to be with me, just for a moment” the image says. Can you stretch my ankle while I try to be myself? Yes, I know what to do.

The work is a choreographic research into gestures taken from Country/Schlager music videos, asking how “butchy” figures like Andreas Gabalier perform masculinity, and what it means to mimic these gestures ourselves. A collaboratively written voiceover by Slim Soledad, Lau Lukarilla and myself guides the audience through an intimate, reflective process, echoing a teenager posing in front of a mirror while trying on these identities.

The video I know what to do is deeply rooted in Sunny's performative practice. The basis of the work is a choreographic research into gestures from music videos of the Country/ Schlager culture. How butchy is the Schlager singer Andreas Gabalier? What happens when we mimic his gestures? The research becomes a metaphor for a feeling: a teenager poses in front of a mirror, appropriating gestures in order to find a solid material extension of themselves.

Sunny's choreographic research is underpinned by a voiceover consisting of collaboratively written texts by the performers, opening up an intimate and poetic layer and taking the audience into the performers' thought processes. The video work is musically underpinned with sound by R'n'B musician Marshall Vincent

The teenagers in the video imitate the often gender-stereotypical gestures of musicians. Robotically or childlike, they imitate the gestures as if they did not yet understand their social implications. Can you stretch my ankle while I try to be myself? They support each other, find their grounding in the physical negotiation and joint repetition of the gestures, and move forward together in a process of understanding the self and the other. They are not alone in their confrontation with social concepts of identity and stereotypical gender images. They do not have to try alone to expand such concepts or their own self-understanding but approach them collaboratively and playfully. We support each other to stretch this notion of identity because it is fucking difficult to stretch notions of identity alone. Again and again, the performers find each other in new forms. 


I KNOW WHAT DO TO
Artist Edition in collaboration with Videoart at Midnight
40 (+3 artist’s proofs)

The box contains
1 exhibition copy: 4K/HD video (H.264)
1 archival copy: 4K ProRes 422 (HQ)
1 certificate of authenticity and rights
1 photograph and 1 SSD drive

Avaialable via: https://www.videoart-at-midnight-editions.de/n-28-sunny-pfalzer-i-know-what-to-do