Das fliegende Künstlerzimmer

Works at a glance

Videos

SHORT FILM NYX, 2017, 20 min.

NYX is an anti-western in eastern Germany. The cyclical battle of light and darkness, personified by a black hen and her white son, is fought in the setting of a hen farm. Thirteen hens in hand-made costumes take up the battle and fight for humane farming of animals.

“(…) the short essay film portrays a costume drama extraordinaire and evokes a vision that I would only have expected in the hedonistic setting of Berlin’s Bar25. Sophia has depicted her group of friends and how they party, play and run, again simply by documenting what’s close to her heart and taking it somewhere, with every made-up thing being just a made-up thing. NYX cares little about coherence and even less so about lifestyle issues. Recognising people’s nature in the animals is perhaps the central idea of this film. But it’s also a piece of audio-visual literature about female figures, otherness and a search for origins – questions that ultimately form worlds.”
Nana Kogler

watch on: www.sophiamix.net/nyx/

Objects

NEW DRESDEN DAILY, 2022 – 2024

1^st & 2^nd edition
Newsprint, 50 cm x 35 cm
Publisher: Staatsschauspiel Dresden
Editorial team: Wanja Saatkamp, Maike von Harten, Sophia Mix & Ina Weise
Circulation: 250

NEW DRESDEN DAILY is a re-enactment of the historical THE DRESDEN DAILY, a newspaper published almost daily between 3 February 1906 and 10 July 1910. At the time it was the first English-language daily newspaper in Germany (accessible from digital.slubdresden.de). 

The content of the NEW DRESDEN DAILY comes from the collaborative setting featuring guests at the Monday Café. It has appeared once a year since 2022.

GLOBAL WARMING (VERSION NO. 2), 2017

Plastic bottles, nylon thread
15 cm x 400 cm x 370 cm
Exhibition view, “Funplastic”, City Gallery of Wolfsburg Art Association, 2017

GENITALIENISCHE LANDSCHAFT, 2023

Textiles, carpet and foam, 6 m x 4 m x 5 m (variable)
Catalogue and curation: Josef Panda and Sophia Mix
Photographs: R. Schittko

“As Lassalle said, the most revolutionary act is, and will always be, to say the truth out loud.”
Rosa Luxemburg

When I was sewing my genitalian topography, I was asked why there was no pubic hair in my work. That was when I had a flashback: I’m five years old and I’m sitting with two women in a side room at my kindergarten. I don’t know why I’m there on my own and why I’m not allowed to play with the others. The women want something from me, they’ve been before. This time they brought dolls for me. But the dolls have funny strings of hair under their arms and between their legs. And large penises and vulvas. I know that because I’d very recently had a bath with my dad and had asked him. Something I’d just found out was that girls and boys have different parts between their legs. And I’d told my friends in kindergarten about it. And one of them told her mum. And she told the police. And then the police came to the kindergarten and asked me about my dad’s penis and then my dad had to move out and my mum cried a lot. So I play baths with the dolls and notice that the women are impatient again, just like they were the last time. One of the women asks me again what happened in the bath. I repeat for her that there are penises and vulvas. She rolls a piece of paper up into a phallus, puts it in my hand and asks me what I did with the penis. I start crumpling up the paper to make it more like the natural phenomenon of a non-erect penis, but that also annoys the woman and she takes it away from me. They leave and luckily don’t come back again. 

I now think that this was probably my first sculptural work. Coping with the audience’s frustration in order to tell the truth. Now people move amid breast mountains, on pubic mounds and under penis clouds. A feeling rises in me of security and simultaneously discomfort. I’d like to go back to when breasts were places of ignorance, penises the phenomena of a world of discovery, and labia the ceiling of my uninhibitedness. A paradisiac small child utopia. And the desire for a sexuality that’s more about discoveries and the topography of bodies than about the pornographic performance of a heteronormativity that bores and frustrates me.

MONDKALENDER, 2023

Aluminium, paint, lime wood, gesso, rabbit-skin glue, pigment/egg tempera
60 cm x 60 cm

Nothing influences our relationship with sexuality as much or as subtly as our Christian heritage in which female sexuality, abortion, anal practices, masturbation and experiments with psychoactive plants were condemned, as written down in the “Malleus Maleficarum” by the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer in 1486. However, in order to recover the archaic images and powers of the prehistoric matriarchy that were long suppressed and in which I am hoping to believe, I designed a lunar goddess decorated with symbols of power from different cultures. She wears a halo in the design of phases of the moon, reflecting the year in ancient cultures that was divided into 13 months of 28 days in a calendar geared to the menstrual cycles of female bodies. Because, as Paul B. Preciado writes in his 2001 book “Testo Junkie”, our bodies are “spaces for political agency and critical resistance to normalization”.

Using the technique of wooden sculpture painting, I build on Christian depictions of saints. And what’s holy is wholesome. And it’s wholesome to perceive of our needs for physical proximity as natural, just like eating, drinking and sleeping, and to cherish them.

Music

NOTHING SPECIAL EDITION, April 2023

Meta / bass; Vero / clarinet; Stefan Brock / portrait; Florian Illing / mastering; Paul Uhlig & Daniel Lichtenstein / recording and mixing