@ Viscose / Between Bridges Berlin

During the week of September 11-17, Lior Shamriz & Matt Polzin will work at Viscose studio @ Between Bridges Berlin. 
Reminiscing on his fantasies of late 1990s and early 2000s high fashion while living in the East Mediterranean, Shamriz revisits the hi-8 tapes and visual materials they recorded two decades ago of queer Mizrahi army drop-outs fantasizing about an unreachable Berlin. The mundane footage includes navel-gazing dance experiments in front of the mirror accompanied by Marlene Dietrich and Ryoji Ikeda, folding laundry to David Bowie, Tekken battles on PlayStation, and Gucci magazine spreads. Shamriz considers both the naivety of this anti-nationalist queer urban past as well as the endearing promises of their dreams about Foucault and Balenciaga.
Writing fiction, Matt Polzin researches how rural geographies are utilized by coastal U.S. artists as a canvas for fantasizing escape. He reflects on the aesthetics of past utopian land projects in the Midwest, including artist colonies, hippie communes, and queer separatists, and pulls from his own experiments with rural living in his early twenties. Probing the competing narratives of the Great Lakes region as climate refuge and conservative backwater, he explores the romanticization of rural poverty as a condition of capitalist expansion.