Lila-Zoé Krauß

Lives and works in Wien, Austria

Artist statement

My practice explores how ideas of normality, reality, and subjectivity are produced through social, technological, and historical systems. I develop research-driven multimedia operas that move between auto-fiction and historical investigation, tracing entanglements between psychiatry, media technologies, cybernetics, memory, and desire. Working across music, moving image, text, performance, costume, and computer-generated environments, I construct theatrical constellations in which different realities and temporalities overlap. Rather than treating these media as separate disciplines, I use them as interconnected dramaturgical layers, in which sound, image, performance, and objects equally organize space and act upon one another. Central to my work is an interest in madness and imagination not simply as psychological categories, but as sites from which normative systems of knowledge can be questioned. This inquiry is informed by my own queer-femme perspective and by growing up in a matrilineal family shaped by mental illness, psychiatric institutionalization, and intergenerational economic precarity, while simultaneously having access to education and cultural capital. This contradictory position—between cultural access and material insecurity, and between an intimate knowledge of psychiatric institutions and the ways in which they can constrain, support, classify, diagnose, and regulate individual lives—has profoundly shaped the questions I bring to my work. Rather than...

Artwork