The Politics of LOL are a series of performances for super lo-fi video, acted and recorded by Claude, Dersch & the Sky Collector (aka Simona, Ramona and guest artist Ileana) in 2015 in Bucharest. The artists play and run in the urban nationalist context that surrounds them. Romania’s public and political space is being suffused with direct or masked far right discourse.

The film, The Dacian Apocalypse, whose voiceover text records the artists’ experiences as space explorers unexpectedly confronted with an apocalypse which happens slightly sooner than predicted, with catastrophic effects: The apocalypse, triggered by nationalistic consumer goods and by embroidered blouses, forces our bodies to become microscopic battlefields, fuelled at their turn by chips and cookies, discounted goods and secondhand quantum batteries.

The cityscape presented throughout the film brings together real places and events: e.g. the Cathedral of the Salvation of the Romanian Nation or other state institutions, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Politics of LOL is also a manifesto against instrumentalization, for voicing one’s own issues and for understanding oneself as an oppressor, for threading carefully just like the bear over the mouse.

Simona and Ramona (or as drag personas Claude and Dersch) are interested in queer and gender issues: Simona working on related topics from within the contemporary art field and Ramona mixing literary studies with her experience of working/volunteering in feminist groups and anti-discrimination associations. They are also part of Local Goddesses, a group of women interested in feminist art practices, based in Bucharest.

More about the artists: www.simonaramona.wordpress.com, www.poetrybody.wordpress.com

With special thanks to Unicorn Artists in Solidarity (for organizing a great residency program, a true model of cooperation between artists) and Inter Arts Center (for hosting the event and supporting the editing of the video projects).