With Capsule, Luxembourg Art Week takes over vacant spaces, store windows, and façades in the city center. Each activated space will be visible from the street around the clock.
The Capsule project benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
Miriam Schmidtke
The Manifesto of Post-Phlegmatism
Location
Quintet Private Bank (former ATM)
Grand-Rue, L-1661 Luxembourg
Art Walk Challenge
With the kind support of Quintet Private Bank
The Manifesto of Post-Phlegmatism is a speculative cult that celebrates apathy, stagnation and lethargy in order to reject the oppressive demands of capitalism. It embarks on a lucid dream through our hyper-connected post-internet world to overcome the societal values that equate worth with ceaseless motion. Instead, it proposes sleep as a form of defiance, a conscious withdrawal from systems of exploitation and control. The vision of sleep as a communal, sacred act reframes rest not only as a personal need but as a collective form of liberation.
The work is a prominent illuminated billboard proclaiming “There’s nothing soft about needing more than eight hours of sleep”. It is accompanied by a sound installation that silently broadcasts the manifesto to its audience, inviting them to pause and to consider sleep not as a passive retreat but as an act of defiance. The text is a roughly 15-minute piece performed in spoken word and accompanied by the composition of Dutch musician Albert van Veenendaal. The special feature is the sound getting played by a transducer device that generates vibrations on the glass window. It enables the material, the whole window, to become a resonating speaker itself.
Miriam Schmidtke (b. 1991, Berlin, Germany) is a media artist, a theater-maker, and a writer based in Berlin (Germany) and Vienna (Austria). Her work transcends disciplinary boundaries, offering a holistic exploration of ethical, cultural, and existential dilemmas of our world. Her projects often blur the lines between reality and fiction, inviting audiences to question the implications of advanced technologies and systemic inequities of society. Through a multifaceted practice, Miriam Schmidtke crafts immersive encounters that confront the complexities of the digital age and the essence of humanity in an increasingly automated world. Her work interrogates bias, discrimination, and exclusion within technological systems and societal norms, shedding light on impasses perpetuated by dominant power structures.
Interview of Miriam Schmidtke
Discover the ART WALK by downloading the map here.
