Film

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz: how we always survived

Erika Balsom discovers spaces where resistant bodies are welcome

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, all the things she said, 2025

Scuff, streak, scratch: an array of marks inscribes the glossy surfaces of the three black panels positioned at the entrance to Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s ‘how we always survived’. Affixed to a temporary structure that obstinately blocks out the grand interiors of the Villa Maraini, the ‘Dancefloor Pieces’, 2024–25, are works of gestural abstraction haunted by missing bodies. Each has a subtitle connecting it to a particular person (eg, Portrait of Danielle Gallegos) and each is the product of a 90-degree rotation in space and an irrecoverable lapse of time. Swathes of what was once underfoot migrate upward, to be appreciated as the traces of ephemeral movements that have escaped representation. The inaugural position accorded to this monochrome triptych can be readily explained by its invocation of dance and nightlife – themes long-important to the Berlin-based duo – and by its introduction of performers who feature in video works in adjacent rooms. (Gallegos, for instance, is the central figure of El Cristal Es Mi Piel, 2025, in which she sings inside Madrid’s Palacio de Cristal as artificial fog fills the space, denying its promise of transparency.) Yet there is something else about the ‘Dancefloor Pieces’ that makes them an appropriate anchor for the presentation: they dwell in the time of the aftermath, mingling the exuberance of corporeal expression with absence, and even loss.

In a letter to the visitor pinned to the wall in the villa’s sun-drenched winter garden, the artists spell out their intentions: ‘With this show, we like to insist on queerness, on demilitarisation, and the cohabitation of fabulous, non-compliant bodies.’ This crystallises in All the Things She Said, 2025, a 25-minute video portrait of Chelsea Manning, shot in Berlin’s SchwuZ, a queer club founded in 1977. Manning is certainly not best known as a DJ, yet here she takes the stage in twinkling kitten ears, playing jungle and hard house to an empty room, beginning with the song that gives the work its title. If the lyrics of this opening track hint at Manning’s status as WikiLeaks whistleblower and trans activist, Boudry and Lorenz otherwise steer clear of retelling her well-known story. Moving, listening and feeling take precedence over speech and information, as if a fatigue with declarative statements had set in. In a brief interview, on display in the winter garden atop a counter bearing images of counters of Rome’s queer bars, Manning mentions that music has given her ‘healing, strength, inspiration’, and never more so than when she was in prison. It is as close the exhibition will come to linguistically articulating anything about her political actions.

Like the ‘Dancefloor Pieces’, All the Things She Said honours its subject through obliquity and belatedness. After the punctual moment of newsworthiness, after the bluster and blather, after so many others have moved on, Boudry and Lorenz stay with Manning. They create a calm, simple portrait of her in the distinctive key of repair, one marked as much by what it leaves out – pain, betrayal, cruelty, the demand to explain oneself – as by what it shows: a girl having fun in a room that is, in its promise of freedom, the inverted double of the prison cell where she spent so much time. So far, so celebratory. But as the camera slowly detaches from Manning and takes in the room surrounding her, the emptiness overwhelms. Where is everybody? As Manning stands alone, solitary confinement, unbelonging, and the burden and blessing of fame, which forever tears one apart from the crowd, all creep in.

Understood in relation to the rest of the exhibition, there are other, less melancholic ways of parsing this solitude. The refusal to fill the room with dancers and to film them is a bit like the artwork equivalent of tape placed over a phone’s camera lens at the entrance to a club: a recognition that the temporary, anonymous utopia of the dancefloor can be experienced only through presence. Better to not even try to document it, better to keep it secret. The artists are ever wary of demands for visibility and legibility, which can have punishing effects. Their sculptural Wig Pieces, 2025, foreground disguise, while in (No) Time, 2020 – a video featuring a quartet of dancers – automated blinds descend in front of the image, blocking access to the bodies in movement. The three main video works of ‘how we always survived’ are displayed in a choreographed sequence, such that only one is activated at any given moment. Is it any surprise, then, that Boudry and Lorenz decline to depict the mass of people who might dance to Manning’s music? Including no one, they include everyone – and we all escape scrutiny.

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s ‘how we always survived’ is at Istituto Svizzero, Rome, to 2 February 2026.

Erika Balsom’s criticism collection, The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2026.

First published in Art Monthly 493: February 2026.