Pia Louwerens: I’m Not Sad, The World is Sad

‘I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad’ is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist ‘differently’ through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the institution’s curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens dresses her protagonist in the different professional guises of artistic labour. Her experiences as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begin to overlap and blend under the name of ‘performance’.

‘I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad’ is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.