Tracey Snelling – How We Live
- Jonas
Arriving at Tracey Snelling’s studio apartment in Kreuzberg, she brought her sculptures to life for me and we spent the first 15 minutes walking through the world(s) she has created in the past.
The sculptures, inspired by real life places from all around the world, featuring sound, light and video elements, fill the studio with a wild mixture of impressions and create the feeling of standing on a bustling street in one of the world’s metropolises. This kind of sensory overload and multimedia approach is characteristic for Snelling, who works in sculpture, film, photography, installation and performance.
Her artworks are explorations of the extreme complexities of our lives, focussing on the social entanglements – from fleeting encounters to the love of our life – that make our lives bearable and overly complex at the same time.
The places of interest to Snelling are not the “happy“ suburbs with scissor-cut lawn but rather the more obscured, stigmatized places which are dismissed by most without a closer look.
She presents us her empathic, nuanced portraits of these places and invites us to join her path of curiosity on the absurdities of life and what we all have in common.
At the moment Berlin is your home of choice and also subject to several artworks of yours. What’s special for you about the city?
I first visited the city when I was doing a project in Frankfurt and then decided to return and sublet a live/work studio for half a year. When it was over and I got back to Oakland, I realized I had to come back.
The city is so interesting and vibrant, there’s so much art – and culture in general – going on.
I also feel that people here have seen everything. They don’t care what you’re doing and it feels like there’s a certain amount of freedom that I haven’t felt in other places.
Looking at your work, I often get the feeling of wanting to break free. Is that a feeling you consciously include into your work?
I’m really interested in this point where someone makes a decision to make an actual change in their life. What pushes someone to that place? What’s the deciding factor?
My movie “Nothing” (2012) explored this quite literally. In the film, it’s the moment when Jane, the main character, decides that she has to leave. She has been trying on these lives of other people while cleaning their motel rooms, and then has a sudden realization that if she doesn’t get away right now, she will be stuck in an unhappy life.
In 2018 at my solo exhibition “First We Take Manhattan“ at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, I had two life-size rooms–a living room and a bedroom. Within these rooms I had many performances about the weird things we do when we are alone at home. I think that we are all really freaks at heart and do both mundane and strange things when no one is watching, and there is a freedom when we are alone – or with those we are close with – in a private space. Last year, at Tokyo Arts and Space, I did a performance in my love hotel installation where Hajime Kinoko, a well-known shibari artist, tied various props from my love hotel series to my body, making me, the sculptor, into a sculpture. On another level, even though I was being tied and weighed down with these objects, the performance represented freedom as I was morphing into an otherworldly creature together with the props and things I love. I like the contrast and the push and pull of this.
Do you feel like you’re trying on different lives with your work?
Maybe not trying on other lives, but I feel like I gain access to others and their lives. I’m always curious about people and places, and I want to see new and different things. Taking my experiences in Tokyo for example – being able to go to the male host clubs and doing interviews – I realized that if I wasn’t an artist, or journalist, I probably wouldn’t have had that chance. It’s the same with my love hotel project and film where I took individuals to themed love hotel rooms and interviewed them about love and relationships. I’m incredibly grateful that people want to participate in my projects and open up to me about their lives.
I realized that I want to keep exploring things that interest me and then figure out how they inform my artworks, not the other way around.
Is there a specific goal or feeling you want to arrive at with a work? Like a point where you say, ok, now I’m done?
It really depends on the work. For my exhibition at Haus am Lützowplatz I built a sculpture of one of the Vele di Scampia buildings, outside of Napoli, Italy, which is architecturally very complex. While working on this as well as other works, I decide which details are important to capture the essence of the place and which I can skip. With this type of work, it would be possible to just keep going further and further with detail, but I think it’s even better to leave some details off so one can focus on the most important aspects. Editing is so necessary when making my work as well as being sensitive to the building, its location and mostly the people that live there.
Vele di Scampia has been the center of the drug trade and mafia for many years and gained notoriety with the book, film and tv series “Gomorrah”. However, I find it more interesting to look at why it turned out the way it did. Originally this social housing project was comprised of seven buildings and should have had all the infrastructure to function like a small city. However, as money ran out during construction, the needed infrastructure was never built and all these people were pretty much stranded outside of Napoli without their basic societal needs met. This made it a prime location for drugs and crime to arise. Unfortunately this kind of situation happens globally, I hope that my sculpture and the discussion around it can help draw attention to this issue and to the plight of the people there.
You explore places and subcultures all around the world. What would you say is the red thread through all of it?
Overall I’m interested in people and how they live. I’m interested in my culture, other cultures, and how they function together and separately. Sometimes the intertwining of cultures works well, other times it’s chaos. It’s interesting how unique different countries and even cities can be from one another. I also like to see how societies function in various places and notice the variations and similarities.
I’ve also always been interested in sexuality and wanting to see what you’re not supposed to see. I imagine it comes from things being off limits. I find the power dynamics interesting and when and how this power sometimes shifts.
For example the different power dynamic in the male host clubs in Japan compared to the hostess clubs was highly interesting and also fostered my understanding of Japanese (patriarchic) society at large, which unfortunately is also a global condition.
I’m also currently building a sculpture of the KitKatClub in Berlin, a fetish club that has been around since 1994, now in its third location. I like to visit the club and see how people feel very free to express themselves in a way that you normally cannot do in public. This sculpture and my visits to the club also relate back to the topic of breaking free.
Is there a common finding that you encounter repeatedly in your research?
There’s one thing that runs a lot through my work. For example, take my recent project “About Us” curated by Luca Massimo Barbero at The Home of The Human Safety Net in Venice. The Human Safety Net is a humanitarian foundation helping people in poverty and other vulnerable situations. My exhibition helps spread awareness of social disparities and people in need, which is an important part of my work.
I like to see my work in an even broader context though. What I would love people to realize is that we are all more alike than different and we all have something in common with each other. At some level, we all want similar things. We all want to be safe, experience love, be heard and have a decent place to live. Simple things. That’s the general concept that I find at the heart of everything–that we are alike in many ways and possibly this can be a starting point where a dialogue and understanding can happen.
Tracey Snelling’s solo exhibition “How We Live“ at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, curated by Dr. Marc Wellmann runs until February 9, 2025. It is her most comprehensive exhibition in Berlin so far, reflecting her residencies in New Orleans (2018), Shanghai (2018-19), Paris (2020), Ann Arbor/Michigan (2022) and Tokyo (2022).
Another solo exhibition is set to open at Bund 18 Jiushi Art Museum, Shanghai for Shanghai Art Week November 2025, curated by Su Lei.
