Fette Sans
If I can't sleep at night is it because I am awake in someone else's room?
Producer: Frank Hauschildt
Composer: Andreas Reihse
Live editor during performances: Pfadfinderei
Sexting: Billy Bultheel, Joáz Lima, Maidenfed, and Rio Rio
This is an interview I had with ID magazine which will appear online in the next days. It answers a few questions directly connected to the
• • On your instagram account it says “Fette, like the party? No.“. Can you maybe explain a bit more what the name “Fette Sans“ is all about?
That was an adolescent gesture which took on a survival layer. Back then I lived in the village in France where I grew up, and when I got a hold of an internet connection it felt miraculous. I would spend hours in chat rooms via the handle Fettengeschrift - a sort of contraction of the font Fette Engschrift. The name Fette evolved from that. It was urgent then to carry something smilingly gender *neutral*, short and unusual. When I began meeting people I had met online, I decided to introduce myself this way. Then it simply remained. It’s a bit similar to a tattoo I’d have gotten at 16.
• • Tell us a bit more about you, how did you get interested in art, where are you from etc.? Maybe you can also tell us a secret.
You know these always sound like the questions one is met with when opening an account on a dating platform. I like to listen to secrets told by strangers in a park, and I collect stories of coincidences. It may have been the listening of adults as a kid that made me want to think about *life/art* as a pursuit.
• • You’re doing photography with writing and collages and combine it with film and performance. Why does this multi-disciplinary mixture attract you so much?
It all feels intertwined. The writing reminisces over the images I have taken and invents situations that I could film. It’s like life is an overwhelming stage, and sometimes there are script notes to follow or some to forget.
• • Can you tell us a bit more about your project in collaboration with Hotel ZOO. What’s the concept and message behind? Maybe also a few words about the collaborations you did with other artists/friends there.
I think about displacement a lot. I wonder what have been the common denominators behind the places I have lived in? Over the winter, I spent two months in Yekaterinburg, Russia on a residency at the Museum of Photography. As I was about to leave Berlin in November I realized that I was also thinking about my return, maybe doubting certain foundations of my idea of a home. It became evident that I wanted to develop this confusion further.
I approached the hotel looking for a room that would function as a studio of sorts. I knew already that I wanted to open its door regularly to the outside and that I’d engage in different actions throughout the months. Eventually, I got in touch with friends I also wanted to be in the room with. Artists like Andreas Reihse from the band Kreidler who composed the pieces played during the performances and who also came for two live sets or Sophie Yerly from we find wildness with whom I staged a nap one Sunday afternoon. Billy Bultheel Maidenfed, and Rio Rio made me these very short scripted-selfie-clips that I’d play on repeat during the performances. One night, Linnéa Sjöberg also came for a Salong Flyttkartong session of tattooing and brought her friends. She wrote the date of that night on me then.
• • You’ve been staying in the hotel for 150 nights. And I also read that you’re interested in rituals. How did daily life in the same hotel room for such a long period of time look like?
Rituals allow focus for me. I’d wake up and open the curtains, then the windows and I’d make myself tea. The repetitions really give space to think, and a bare room leaves these thoughts to bounce better - I’d imagine how they’d mingle with the ghosts of all the people who had slept in that room before me. During the day I’d also have a walk in the neighborhood and sometimes, I’d invite someone back into the room to shoot them. Most days though, I’d write.
• • Was there anything you missed about your home?
I missed making food with loved ones.
• • You also left the door open for public every once in a month. How does it feel like to let so many strangers in your room, which is sterile but after such a long time homely as well?
The room calls to be inhabited by people. During the public performances, I loved seeing it become filled in waves, how the energy would fluctuate, how I would get affected by it. For me, the hotel room is that catalyst. If it would have been my *own* bedroom, I sense that it would have been different, but being in this hotel room, I wanted it to speak louder, and to give me cues as to when it was time to close/open its door. After all, I was also a guest of that room.
• • I read that you obsessively like to meet strangers. How come? What fascinates you by it?
James Baldwin comes to mind, he wrote that the strangest people in one’s life are the people one has known, and will always love, that one may helplessly try to anticipate the next move of a stranger, to eventually realize how futile the action is. Strangers bring the present with them.
• • What is still the most intimate thing/moment for you in a world where everyone is oversharing their lives on social media?
Falling asleep next to someone.
• • Is there a weird story to share when some strangers entered the hotel room?
When Sophie Yerly and I decided to sleep for five hours while visitors could enter the room one by one, someone came in who eventually laid down on the floor at the foot of the bed. Since we were sleeping, we only were able to know about this once we visioned the footage from the security cameras that were installed in the room. This man stayed for about 20 min, seemingly also asleep. Once he woke up, he took a photo of us with his phone, then he left the room.
• • Every month when it was open to public there were different performances like the thief, the dancer, or the executioner. You slip into different roles but what do they all still have in common?
Narrative is often a ruse. When I began constructing the project, I chose these five titles as chapters for each month - they come from a list my friend Nick whom I also collaborated with, later on, had put online. These titles convey theatricality in a kind of hyper-drama way, they feel ceremonial and consequential, so for me, they could become sturdy foundations for what I didn’t know would come next. It was also crucial to begin the project with something *stolen*, because it would introduce a mode of operation that continued throughout the months, in which I frankenstein excerpts from articles/interviews/IG posts/Twitter posts/etc.. to form a script. These re-mixed texts would later become lines of dialogues, shooting directions, footnotes, and quotes that I would read/say aloud during the public performances - as if I was rehearsing a play.
• • If I can’t sleep at night is it because I am awake in someone else’s room?
Most likely yes. Or, because the moon is also awake.