My First Car (2001)
Video-installation 7’
Courtesy: Peter Kilchmann, Zúrich
The image of a car endlessly going round and round a crater in a lunar landscape sits well with zilla Leutenegger’s signature conflation of fiction and reality. An interrelation that opens a gateway to a space of desire, of alienation, of interiority, of freedom or the subversion of models and patterns. The artist has used the lunar landscape on other occasions besides in her video My First Car. A territory that belongs both to the world of reality as well as to fantasy in which it is possible to present behaviours and attitudes in an alternative fashion. The act of driving with music on and going round in circles takes us to a sphere of pure entertainment or leisure with a decidedly adolescent undertone. In an interview Leutenegger expressed her interest in entertainment and the meaning and sensation of just killing time: “Young people always have free time and don’t do anything. As an adult, you still recognise the feeling but you have less time, so you give yourself less permission”. Material culture and behaviour are observed from another place, one that corresponds to a dissolution of limits (of age or attitude), to functionality and performance, or to lost pleasures.
