Lady Dracula/Cool

© Photo: Danai Anesiadou

Cinema has long been a source of inspiration for Danai Anesiadou, from B-movies to surrealist cinema and Nouvelle Vague.

Lady Dracula/Cool is a collage of two movie posters: Lady Dracula by Franz Josef Gottlieb from 1977 and Cooley High by Michael Schultz from 1975 (French version: Cool). The work also includes plastic movie props such as decorative friezes and corniches filled with orgonite, a material meant to neutralize invisible negative energies. For the artist, Lady Dracula represents someone who became toxic because of environmental poisoning. More generally, vampirism is seen by Anesiadou as synonymous with hijacking or using the struggle of someone or a group to profit over another. In the exhibition D POSSESSIONS (WIELS, Brussels, 2023), for which this work was produced, she attempted a sort of exorcism (a "depossession") which the use of orgonite in most of the exhibited works indicated.