2026

Intersection with Rebecca Racine Ramershoven at 18th Street Arts Center

Our Time Is Now


A Guest in Native America
- Genoël von Lilienstern

A compilation of original recordings, collected and archival sound materials, and excerpts from Places of Yaanga by Genoël von Lilienstern — compositions for video, audio, flute, saxophone, and synthesizer. Texts by Genoël von Lilienstern.
Composer Genoël von Lilienstern traces a spiral around Villa Aurora, situated on the land of the Tongva First Nation. At various stations along the way, he recalls impressions and encounters with present-day Native American life in the region of Yaanga, now known as Los Angeles.
In the immediate surroundings of the Villa stand oak trees whose acorns once formed the staple food of most Native Americans in temperate North America. Above the Villa, along the Paseo Miramar Trail, rock formations bear Native American names such as Eagle Rock. In these rocks, one can find historical mortar holes used for grinding acorn flour, as well as petroglyphs.
In Santa Monica, Kuruvungna, one of the last sacred springs of the Tongva is said to be threatened by the expansion of a parking lot. Tongva elder Jula gives him a clapper stick and tells him his totem animal is probably a coyote.
During a concert at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, he speaks with the son of Tongva Chief Morales about Mozart. At Topanga Beach, he searches for traces of a former cemetery once adorned with whale bones. Here, he attempts to reverse the movement of the waves and to recognize the voices of the dead in the sound of the Pacific.
In Malibu Creek State Park, fictional layers overlap with the presence of a former village of the Chumash First Nation at the filming location of Planet of the Apes.
He travels into the desert to hear the Bird Songs of the Cahuilla in Morongo, and to the reservation of the Navajo Diné Nation to learn what it means for a Native American language to have survived and to still be spoken in everyday life.

You Ought To Be in Pictures
by Sarah Szczesny

A musical radio play, a sonic love letter to Los Angeles, to Villa Aurora, and to O-Town House Gallery—where Szczesny presented her exhibition „Sarah Loses Out (You Ought to Be in Pictures)“ following her 2021 residency. This sound collage weaves together sing-along tracks, car rides through the city, dinner readings in Marta Feuchtwanger’s library and piano plays at the Villa, candid recordings, chance encounters and fragments of film scenes and cartoons. Moving between intimacy, documentation and fiction, it creates a layered acoustic portrait of place and artistic afterlife. Part homage, part reenactment, part echo, the piece invites into a house that remembers—and sings along.

Sarah Szczeny’s method of dissecting, distorting and separating images, such as cartoon film elements, characterizes her collage, painting and video work.
She examines the conditions of painting by stretching the medium’s boundaries through experimental interventions – for example by using gif and loop techniques as well as sound effects -, a multidimensionality is created that gives the painting character of movement and thus locates it in the tradition of cartoons. In this process of animation of collages, which is so essential for her work, Szczesny combines formal studies and citations of pop culture and art history.