This work is a master class on how to solve this question. North American directors Lucky Benson and Cassandra Guan invited more than sixty artists to each make a fragment of the story to tell the life and work of Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, a performance artist, model, poet and member of the New York dadaist movement, a friend of Man Ray and Duchamp. Even some of her biographers maintain that the famous urinal that transformed the art world forever has more to do with the eschatological work of the baroness than with the man who claimed her authorship.

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Participant:

Luciana Ponte is the founder, curator and webmaster of lalulula.tv. Born in 1981 in Neuquén, Argentina, I currently live and work in Mexico. I studied Visual Arts at the National Art University of Argentina, I received a scholarship from the Torcuato DI TELLA University, and a scholarship from the Center for Artistic Research -CIA- (Arg). Solo exhibitions in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico; and multiple group exhibitions in Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Peru, Colombia and Switzerland.

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About the directors:

Lucky Benson he is a filmmaker and performer. He currently holds the creative direction position at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he dedicated himself to visual editing and senior art direction at The New York Times. Lucky believes that storytelling is a powerful medicine and plans to develop new narrative structures and visual systems for the rest of eternity. His creative work is extensive: he curated the art exhibited at the headquarters of The New York Times, headed a brand collaboration department in Baggu, disseminated vital information about Covid-19 to millions of people through @nytimes and directed a feature-length biopic about a forgotten Dada artist.

His work has appeared in places such as the CPH:DOX Documentary Film Festival, on the BBC, at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, on the screen of the Anthology Film Archives, at the Brooklyn Museum, on the BBC, in The New York Times and on the walls of the Nicolai Wallner Gallery. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union and an MFA from Lund University in Sweden, and has taught at City University of New York and Golden Dome.

Lucky divides his time between Los Angeles and New York City.

Cassandra Guan works on the history of animation, with special attention to the coevolution of modernist aesthetics, new media technologies and life sciences. His research highlights the material intertwining of modernist political cinema and the transnational permutations of a bioanalytical paradigm. He is currently finalizing a book project entitled Maladaptive media: the plasticity of life in the era of its technical reproducibility. In He argues that the radical transformation of animation aesthetics during the interwar period—which took place in film, radio and the written press, in the midst of the global proliferation of mass communication networks—revealed a crisis in the relations between the living being and its environment. The book offers a new approach to the issues of animation and the spectator, by reevaluating the intense intellectual battles in the conceptualization of life and positing a corresponding rupture in the history of the audiovisual format.

Guan received a doctorate in modern culture and media from Brown University. Before joining CMS, he received a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) and held a teaching position in the Whitney Museum's Independent Studies Program. A filmmaker and academic, Guan has participated in several experimental and documentary film productions. Her latest film project, Tender Comrades, an exploration of gender ambiguities and female friendship in left-wing cinemas in mainland China, received an Electronic Media and Film Finishing Funds Award from the New York State Arts Council. Following his interest in the stories of global animation, Guan is developing a second book project that explores the dialectic of mass mobilization and mass automation in media campaigns sponsored by the Chinese state from the 1950s to the present.

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