I am (not) an artist
Shot on a phone while walking from a residency studio through a nearby graveyard, I am (not) an artist documents a moment of existential fracture. I repeat the sentence "I am not an artist" over and over, trying to exorcise the role, trying to convince myself that the category no longer fits. The footage feels confessional, almost embarrassing — a man pacing through a graveyard declaring his own non-artist status. Yet the act of filming, the repetition, the intensity, reveals the paradox: the gesture itself is artistic. Denial becomes creation. When I reached the studio, another artist joyfully echoed the opposite mantra — "I am an artist" — as if responding to me from another psychological universe. I recorded her as well. The two videos, combined, become a duet about identity, validation, doubt, and the impossibility of escaping one's own artistic impulse. The piece sits between humor and crisis. It asks whether an identity can be undone by declaration alone, or whether the act of speaking it gives the very thing you're denying more shape and more power.
Credits
- Location: Berlin, Germany