INTERVIEW WITH LOUIS HAY

Louis Hay, born in 1996, lives and works as a freelance artist and filmmaker in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his studies at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig, where he studied under Prof. Clemens von Wedemeyer until 2021. Since 2023, he has been a master student of Prof. Gerard Byrne at the Städelschule Frankfurt a. Main.

Hay's artistic work explores the theme of temporality through filmic and sculptural media. Hay is interested in the interplay of form and thought, as well as the representation of subjective experiences. His works are characterized by a profound engagement with the possibilities and limitations of representation and perception.

In conversation with Hatje Cantz, Louis Hay talks about a mystical fog experience during the Corona pandemic and how Caspar David Friedrich inspires him in moments of isolation and mental blocks.

Louis Hay, NEBEL (Film Still, with footage from Death Stranding © 2019 Kojima Productions)

Hatje Cantz: Have you experienced a personal Friedrich moment in your life that you'd like to tell us about?

Louis Hay: In May 2020, in the first months after the outbreak of the Corona pandemic, I spent a week with friends on a sailboat in the Baltic Sea. We actually wanted to sail to a Danish island, which was not possible due to the lockdown. One morning, we woke up enveloped in a thick fog. When the fog lifted after a few hours, there was no land in sight, far and wide. It was an absolute void, an impressive experience of nature. But the context of the pandemic lent a very special atmosphere to this moment. It felt as if we had arrived at a zero point, from which everything would become possible, everything newly conceivable. That was very romantic. Both in its beauty and in its transfiguration of the actual social moment.

Hatje Cantz: Can you tell us which elements from Friedrich's work you have incorporated into your own artworks and what role they play in your artistic practice?

Louis Hay: In my essay film NEBEL, I explicitly quote Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. The film forms the starting point for a trilogy of films that deal with specific forms of thought. NEBEL was also a reaction to an everyday experience: the feeling of no longer being able to complete thoughts, no longer being able to penetrate objects. So-called brain fog. A resignation of thought in the face of the mass and speed of information that surrounds me. My film examines the fog metaphor using various (pop) cultural artifacts and attempts to formally reconstruct this state in the viewer's consciousness. The last chapter of the film is dedicated to solitude. I drove to Saxon Switzerland and filmed fog at the spot where Friedrich painted his picture. I noticed formal parallels between the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog and newer works like Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2013) and Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding (2019). This allowed me to establish a connection between the ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism and the emotional, political, and technical isolation in the present. The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is, in a way, the harbinger of a certain future scenario. He stands elevated on a rock, in a place that should actually offer a good overview, and sees nothing but fog. What for Friedrich represented a sublime natural spectacle now seems to me more like an agent of isolation.

Hatje Cantz: In your opinion, why is Friedrich's work still relevant today?

Louis Hay: I'm not an art historian, but what I can say is: it's quite an artistic achievement when, for his 250th anniversary, people talk about "Friedrich moments." Jokes aside, Hans von Trotha aptly put it in his essay on the Friedrich anniversary: "When we celebrate Caspar David Friedrich, we celebrate ourselves." For me, the question is how we deal with history today. Whether, perhaps due to a lack of meaning in our lives, or out of fear of an unstable future, we return to a romanticizing historicism. Or whether we can discover elements in the past with which the present can be defined and the possibility of an emancipated future can be kept open. I think artists can help here.

Louis Hay, NEBEL (Film Still, with footage from Under the Skin © 2013 FILM4