Lucca Lutzky and Juli Bierich: I can no longer remember and neither can you

I Can No Longer Remember and Neither Can You is a two-channel installation by artists Lucca Lutzky and Juli Bierich produced during a summer residency at NeverAtHome. A meditation on memory and sound, the film unfolds in split screen. Each scene appears as a translation of the other, projected against a black void—a gap between what is heard, described, remembered.

Taking Ingeborg Bachmann's 1955 radio play Die Zikaden as a point of departure, the film features twenty participants of different ages and backgrounds who were invited to describe, imitate, or translate personal memories, then developed into abstract, performative gestures. The slipperiness of translation—between media, formats, and languages, from sound to speech to movement, individual gesture to group choreography—lies at the heart of this work.

Bachmann's play is itself a reimagining of a myth from Plato's Phaedrus, of mortals who became so entranced by the first Muses' song that they sang themselves to death. Such devotion was rewarded by being transformed into cicadas, who according to legend survive on air and song alone. An allegory for the enduring desire to lose oneself in artistic expression; of the artist’s required sacrifice of intimate and singular experiences to generate something shared and universal.

The film's structure echoes its themes. Reflections abound, like a mise-en-abyme of parallel mirrors. Ensemble members are repeatedly shown in isolated listening booths, trying and struggling to convey the confounding sound of cicadas, their unique impressions of the same auditory input overlapping in dissonant waves. 

Now, the work is presented in the foyer of the Funkhaus, in the context of its creation, and, very possibly, of the radio play's original broadcast in the '50s. Soon the palimpsest of the radio house will be wiped clean and repurposed, the immaterial traces of its sonic archive dispersed. When it is emptied and remade, what frequency will remain? Perhaps the same one that surrounded us always: the accreted hum of history attempting to translate itself, flickering between the inexpressible and the spoken, the singular and the shared, thinning and thinning until there is only song, and then silence.

Mélanie Scheiner

Lucca Lutzky is a filmmaker from southern Brasil, he lives and works between Paris and London. Often shot on 16mm and 35mm, his films create mundane yet allegorical worlds shaped by muted colors. Through quiet observation and subtle gestures, they unfold in the space between the intimate and the unsettling.

Juli Bierich is a German-Japanese artist based in Antwerp. Her performances explore the ‘in between’ of public and personal space. Using game-like structures, she creates playful works that often provoke unpredictable outcomes. The body serves as a necessary component to her work and can be regarded as a documentary canvas for these encounters between performer, artist and audience.

Film installation:  Lucca Lutzky and Juli Bierich
Casting: Kyra Sophie
Sound design: Theodora Hergheligiu
Cinematography: Louis Lustermann
Performers: Annette Schuhmann, Zoé Schmidt, Omari Soufian Wandji, Kenta Fiedler, Hamdi Hassan Abdi, Ridwan Stemmt, Eveline Wilhelmseder, Samuel Bugu, Juni-Nyusta Ruckendorfer, Kind Stranger, Valentina Larcher, Titus Keller, Juliane Würth, Ivan Tsaritsyn, Bagher Ahmadi, Maria Würth, Esther Oppong and Sofie Royer.