Leonie Brandner
Leonie Brandner works with expansive installations, text, song and performance to explore uncertainties and the fleeting feeling of being part of an unstable system.
To find her own place in a web of tangled realities, she interweaves personal stories with ecological concerns and long-forgotten mythologies to open up spaces that exist on a level beyond mere logic. Her works are vessels for non-linear storytelling, vessels in which complexity is not avoided but used as a tool to give form to a fleeting order. The stories she tells with her work jump from loss to desire, from the temporary to the already long gone.
Leonie Brandner has an MA in Artistic Research from the KABK and completed a course in Ethnobotany and Ethnomedicine at the University of Zurich. She works as a visual artist and has published her first book in collaboration with Onomatopee in 2024 titled ‘Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None’. Leonie lives and works in Den Haag.
Soprano Nina Guo is interested in the sounds of recent and ongoing times, and her performance practice includes interpreting notated music, improvising, and collaborating on interdisciplinary projects.As a concert soloist, she has made appearances with the London Sinfonietta, ICTUS, Contrechamps, Ensemble Modern, Decoder, and others. She recently made her Symphony Hall debut, performing Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures (Ligeti). She specializes in experimental opera, working with groups such as Neuköllner Oper, Guerilla Opera, ECCE, and Opera Lab Berlin. Nina hosts, writes, and performs a live radio show, The Entertainment, on Cashmere Radio (Berlin). The Entertainment is a comedy variety show presenting experimental and contemporary music. Nina lives and works in Berlin.
Leonie and Nina are friends and bring their individual expertise together in collaborative projects.
If Only
Year: 2025
Duration: 9’52’’
Form: single channel video
‘If Only’ is a short film that emerged out of a sung performance for 50 singers of all ages, reviving the mythical stories and medical knowledge of the legendary mandragora plant. The performance took place in 2024 as part of the Kunstlokal Festival in Switzerland. Whereas the performance lasted 35’, the film is an experimental documentation reworking the performance in only 10’. The thousand-year-old story of the mandragora tells of a plant in human form that screams when it is pulled out of the ground. As much as the legend is a product of the human imagination, the mandragora it describes is a plant rooted in the physical world; in ancient Greece the plant was used as a sleeping pill and as a narcotic during operations and is known as one of the best recorded gynaecological herbal substances across history.
‘If Only’ embeds the history of the mandragora in a contemporary context and uses it as a means to try and understand how we humans find meaning in a world that is more mysterious than our minds can comprehend. The piece pays homage to a magical plant and to our deepest dreams, wishes and fears.