Lila-Zoé Krauß

Synopsis:

At night, Girl walks alone along the Elbe in a dream. A graffiti reading “Freedom of Madness” initiates the transition to the imaginary psychiatric ward 161. There, her mother MOW (Manic Old Woman) sits enthroned in front of a running television, beside her a bed with restraint straps. Girl hands over licorice and a document from the unemployment office titled “Master Plan.” While a nurse announces a reduction in medication, a television program promoting “critical thinking and unconventional analysis” begins, its content influencing the conversation between mother and daughter. Dream VI: [Station 161] stages psychiatry as a theatrical space in which normativity, media power, and reality become negotiable.

Project:

“[MOW] Truth is a dialogue between madness and rationality. But for some time, the dialogue has been broken”

The 19th century marked the emergence and institutionalization of modern psychiatry. This was accompanied by a new understanding of so-called mental and nervous disorders, with gender playing a decisive role as well as pathological ideas. At that time, theater played a key role in communicating and popularizing these ideas in the media.

In Dream VI: [Station 161], parallels are drawn between the concepts of theatricality and madness, both in terms of content and visuals. In the scene Krauß combines real objects like restrain straps, a TV, an official document with fictional elements like the costume, a critical TV program and a book titled Matrix: Mutations of the 21^st Century to stage psychiatry as a place where constructions of normativity and reality can be questioned. On Station 161 mother and daughter encounter each other, share intimacy, memories, wishes and fears. In this constellation the TV functions as a third actor, affectively intervening in their conversations and the atmosphere of the space, structuring the scene dramaturgically.

When MOW decides to destroy the “Master Plan” issued by the unemployment office at the end of the scene, she refuses the narrow social matrix imposed on her by institutional authority. Madness here is not framed as a deficit, but as a site where dominant regimes of perception, productivity, and rationality break down. By staging psychiatry as a theatrical and media-saturated space, Dream VI: [Station 161] proposes madness as a critical force that exposes the limits of rational governance and normative subjectivation. The work insists on the necessity of re-entering a dialogue with madness—not to normalize it, but to recognize its capacity to unsettle established realities and to imagine alternative forms of subjectivity.

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Dream VI: [Station 161] was produced with the support of BKM, Kunsthaus Hamburg and BMWKMS. The work was shown first as an installation in the group show Future Continuous at Kunsthaus Hamburg (05.12.2025-25.01.2026).

STARRING
MOW – Christin Krauß
Girl – Lila-Zoé Krauß
TV Presenter – Tala Al-Deen
Nurse (Voice) – Cennet Rüya Voß
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Video, Sounddesign, Costume – Lila-Zoé Krauß
Camera – Helena Wittmann
Set Production – Ricarda Schwarz
Light – Julian Gillman
Sound Recordist – Nikoloz Mamatsashvili
Supported by BMWKMS für Medienkunst

Video:
Lila-Zoé Krauß, 2025
Dream VI: [Station 161],
Videomontage, 14‘50
Color, Stereo-Sound
Camera: Helena Wittmann

Links
Trailer
for screener send inquiry to inquiry@lilazoekrauss.com