MUMMYTHEDADDY is a performance lecture that deals with fathers, war, and memory. Artist Leon Filter reimagines the structure of family legacy in a story about intimate perspectives on and political questions of communication, as well as speculating upon reasons for the breakdown of that very communication.

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Unfolding within Lichtspiele’s cinematic setting (a place Filter describes as an environment “for the receiving of images and the display of desires”), MUMMYTHEDADDY is based on a collection of anecdotes told by his forefathers. The artist examines how these anecdotes construct subjectivity in favor of traditional family structures—structures that cast queer subjects as life-long bachelors while their partners fill the role of a best friend. Filter asks why subjectivities are primarily valued for their reproductive potential with the least possible alteration, instead of engendering new originals divergent to the lineage.

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MUMMYTHEDADDY carves out space for identities that refuse to be normalized into a family-friendly format, seeking instead to articulate degenerative propositions related to dementia, as well as a divestment from personal claims on reproduction.

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Leon Filter is an artist and writer based in Berlin and Rotterdam. His work—tree bending, father research and model building—materializes in different states of video, drawing, performance, and text, as well as their supporting settings and collaborations. Oriented towards documentary relations, Filter focuses on the processes through which images (and their afterimages) create relations, as well as how they enforce or deny access towards their subject as a way to deal with present conditions.

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