Òscar Escudero & Belenish Moreno-Gil: The Day Fanny Mendelssohn Died

The concept of »Hausmusik« went hand in hand with the establishment of the Lied genre, which was consolidated behind the walls of the Biedermeier bourgeois houses in the first half of the 19th century. In a warm environment in which the enjoyment coexisted with the error of the learning process in a safe space, everything was left to the complicity of the few people attending a soirée.

 

After the pandemic, our living rooms have become part of the public environment and extensions of the workspaces. Loving eyes, but above all strange ones, glance through our intimate spaces and force them towards a certain order, which is none other than that of a stage, more or less carefully tidied up. A bookshelf, the backdrop for an academic meeting; some books, part of the props, and the cat, the actor who appears at just the right moment to temper the mood.

 

However, not all living rooms are the same. The design of the objects in some coexists with the precariousness of the materials in others. Likewise, the quality with which we access them is also uneven. The resolution of the cameras and the sharpness of the signal are also part of the decorative apparatus, in a curious reflexive game in which the medium through which it is perceived becomes part of the perceived object.

 

THE DAY FANNY MENDELSSOHN DIED is, above all, Hausmusik. However, the lounge where it materializes is not safe and comfortable anymore. The eyes of uninvited guests watch it. The lounge has also been delocalised, connecting a shared room in the Philippines, where a single mother works moderating content for Silicon Valley companies, with the bedroom of a webcammer in Caracas or the backroom of a kebab stall in Bremen. The body that works and observes the traces of its exhaustion is always that of a woman who, with Fanny Mendelssohn/Hensel, whose biography is adopted as a gravitational pole in the work, is situated in the cosmos of millions of transparent rooms.

Belenish Moreno-Gil & Óscar Escudero