Artist talk

A Separate Reality. Cyrill Lachauer in discussion with the ethnologist Alexander Knorr

For his exhibition I am not sea, I am not land presented in Haus der Kunst’s former air raid shelter, Cyrill Lachauer has created a new installation consisting of films, videos, photographs, wall texts as well as a slide projection and sound installation. The work explores the concept of land in its most varied forms and tells stories of the people who inhabit it. Lachauer studied cinematography, ethnology, and art. Spurred by the idea of a narrative landscape in which the history of its inhabitants is inscribed, Lachauer began traveling. In his youth, he discovered a book by Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality. This led him on a cinematic journey, which resulted in his film Dodging Raindrops - A Separate Reality (2017).

A shared fascination with Carlos Castaneda unites Lachauer and Alexander Knorr, who studied ethnology, psychology, and theater science and teaches at the Institute of Ethnology at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich as a privatdozent. In his doctoral thesis on the subject of the “Meta Trickster,” Knorr examined, among others, the life, work, and activities of Castaneda, who became world famous as an author, but played a dubious role as an ethnologist. Knorr, whose research spans the fields of technology and media, ethnology, popular culture, epistemology, and science and technology, speaks with Cyrill Lachauer about traveling to foreign lands, Castaneda’s fictitious field research, and the construction of reality.

Moderation: Susanne Touw
Language: German

A joint event of Haus der Kunst and the Sammlung Goetz in the context of the exhibition, Cyrill Lachauer. I am not sea, I am not land.