An ode to free imagination
Fanni Futterknecht uses the media of drawing, object art, performance, video and installation in her work to examine social structures and dynamics. She visualises them in a poetically charged manner and condenses them into complex artistic expressions in multimedia scenarios. The focus is on the potential of fiction.
The artist draws on the everyday that frequently goes unnoticed. This year, together with composer and performer Camilo Latorre, she plunged into the depths of the world of the fantastic Japanese toy industry during her most recent stay in Japan and developed the lecture performance SIMULATION UNIVERSE, which she is set to turn into a film.
SIMULATION UNIVERSE is not so much a lecture but rather a play, dramaturgically staged with video sequences and lighting effects. The soundscape by Camilo Latorre plays a major role, underscoring the narration with his own compositions full of references and allusions so that it mutates into a sensuous performance.
At the beginning, Fanni Futterknecht sits on one of the cubes that characterise the puristic stage set, musing dreamily about the toys of her early childhood, figures of forest animals with which she created and experienced entire worlds in her imagination.
A digression into the history of toys is inserted into her own personal history. The performance jumps thematically from toys that serve to establish social stereotypes and ideologies to toys as a political tool, to their use in service of war propaganda, for example under Hitler or the current Russian regime. The figure of the wind-up Atomic Robot Man made of sheet metal, representing a robot in front of a mushroom cloud, exemplifies toys as a distortion of reality as well as an economic factor: after all, the Atomic Robot Man was produced in the post-war period in Japan for the American market. Which brings Fanni Futterknecht back to her own history and her connection with Japan.
Because the forest animals described at the beginning were soon joined by Hello Kitty figures from Japan. A suggestion of subtle criticism, full of humorous and self-ironic overtones: memories of her own childlike desire for the “cute” Hello Kitty figures and the countless knick-knacks that came with them. The boundless world of fantasy inhabited by her forest animals inevitably found competitors in the Hello Kitty figures, which better adhered to the constraints of what was actually available.
Despite the demonstrative arguments claiming that toys, stripped of their supposed innocence, act as a deliberate interface between manipulation and consumer capitalism, a pleasurable journey into the world of Japanese toy production unfolds on stage.
Fanni Futterknecht puts the simulation of realities as intended by the toy industry on show for us. Fantastic things are happening there ‒ scary, absurd and funny at the same time: as she produces increasingly large, magnificent strawberries, sewn from flattering pink velvet, and lets them dangle enticingly from the ceiling, she takes little grotesque beasts and monsters from a seemingly inexhaustible stockpile, garish figures made of plastic, which have also found their way into children’s rooms from the world of Japanese manga, films, video games and amusement parks. The artist moves about among the gigantic strawberries and the martial toy figures, between two clashing worlds that seem to want to lure us into their devious cosmoses with their distorted dimensions. She tells us about the (especially in Japan) omnipresent enticements into these fictional worlds, which inevitably brings the absurdity of various theme parks (Barbieland, Majaland, Super Mario World, etc.) to mind, where the visitors themselves ultimately mutate into playthings of the insatiable market.
But Fanni Futterknecht also talks about an alternative world in Japan: the subtle resistance of the sofubi makers forming in secret. Their figures are fantasy creatures too ‒ cast in vinyl, not industrially, though, but made by hand, and versatile thanks to a modular system. Which is how they assert their worth as unique specimens and pieces of art. For the artist, they represent a possible escape from the ravenous scenario of the global toy market and a model based on which she creates her own soft sofubi: a fabric monster that rises several metres high by fitting individual segments together – a giant sofubi, matching the enormous strawberries – what a funny ambivalence. Futterknecht stages her own bizarre play world with the strawberries and the giant sofubi. The objects are handmade from fabric but, in their plasticity, seem monstrous. At the end, she stands with her back to the audience before the figure that towers over everything, heroic sonances sound – as an ambivalent open ending.
In Japan, Fanni Futterknecht encountered a world of toys and games displaying a level of intensity we are unaccustomed to. She experienced for herself the fascination emanating from the fantastic creatures and their associated universes, which appeals to and manages to capture people of all ages and social classes. Torn between her admiration for them and lamenting the discarding of toys that function as a stimulant to creativity, the artist locates the danger of fleeing from one’s own imagination to consumption in the insatiable marketing of finished and predefined fantasies by the toy and game industries.
SIMULATION UNIVERSE is the artist’s attempt to understand the Japanese toy cosmos. However, she introduces breaks to the pleasurable play when she distances herself from it in moments of reflection. Her actions are playful, yet full of criticism and self-irony. The giant sofubi is a metaphor and the hero in this ode to free imagination.
Margareta Sandhofer (b. 1968 in Innsbruck) is a curator, author and art critic based in Vienna. She obtained a degree in art history from the University of Vienna in 2003 and has been working as a freelancer ever since, with a focus on the contemporary art scene. Her numerous contributions have appeared in specialist magazines and exhibition catalogues.