Fear of Breakdown

Join us for a screening and conversation on performance, fragmentation, and affective rupture in the work of Loretta Fahrenholz with writer and theorist Felix Bernstein and psychoanalyst Cassandra Seltman. The discussion will focus on Loretta’s latest film Trash The Musical (2023)—on view as part of her current exhibition at Amant—as well as her 2011 film IMPLOSION, which will be screened as part of this event.
Trash The Musical is a post-cinematic portrait that follows the performance artist Alicia McDaid as she cleans out her aging uncle’s Philadelphia home, a process that Loretta deftly juxtaposes with footage of the absurdist performances Alicia produces for social media. IMPLOSION—a reimagining of Kathy Acker’s 1983 play of the same title—weaves a surreal and fragmented narrative shot through with themes of desire, identity, and disintegration that eschews conventional characters, scenes, or a typical narrative progression. Both films are exemplary of Loretta's approach to filmmaking, juxtaposing the digital and the corporeal and disrupting conventional narrative structures and expectations of cinema.
With their respective backgrounds in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis as a lens, Bernstein and Seltman will link Loretta's films with a new theory of breakdown based on the work of Donald Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, and Wilfred Bion. A knotted web tying together surplus, waste, celebrity meltdown, spectacle, hoarding, data management, desperate loneliness, and institutionalization, this presentation will point to new modes of containment that serve as an alternative to the classic compromise formation of the symptom.
Amant programs are always free. RSVPs are required. Fear of Breakdown will start at 6:30pm on Thursday, January 16 in Géza, located at 306 Maujer.

Host or Publisher Amant Foundation