She's Excited! & Clara Francesca & Gretta Louw – "Vortex: Jenny Marx"

This is a sound sculpture by She's Excited! featuring Clara Francesca and a visual by Gretta Louw for the exhibition #MakeUsVisible x denkFEmale in Munich, Germany, curated by Anne Wichmann, Tabitha Nagy and Amadea Pely. "The sound and visual monument “Vortex: Jenny Marx” by She’s Excited! (sound and production), Clara Francesca (voice) and Gretta Louw (visuals) honors the German socialist Jenny von Westphalen, Karl Marx’s wife. If you listen with headphones, you can hear that a vortex of deep sounds and depressive thoughts (sourced from Jenny's letters) is juxtaposed with sparkling high synthesizers rising towards the center, representing Jenny’s longing for a lighter life and unconditional love. The visual element is a digital painting that incorporates nature photography and various algorithmic tools and digital collaging techniques. It is positioned on the floor of the AR installation to both delineate a space within which the sound can be experienced and invite the viewer into the subject, Jenny Marx's imagined psychological territory. Clara Francesca writes: “Jenny Marx and I share the same birthday 175 years apart, and a passion to find complementarity between private wealth and commonwealth. I have become obsessed exploring the dualities of darkness/light, pain/pleasure, assertion/surrender, permanence/impermanence, mental distortion/mental hygiene. I have come to view Jenny as a vehicle through which to advocate for the value of humanity: for the valuable human.” The monument is placed by the Heinrich-Heine-Fountain in Munich, because Jenny was good friends with poet Heine. By this foundtain, there is a physical statue of a woman sitting literally behind bars at Finanzgarten Munich, adding allegorical illusions to Jenny's life." www.makeusvisible.io/munich