Ale Bachlechner: Hustle/Idle

Videostill from Ale Bachlechner, Hustle/Idle, 2024, 16:45 min., video, colour, sound. Courtesy of the artist

- selected by Inke Arns (HMKV) –

In the loop, the video revolves around the contrasting verbs ‘to hustle’ (to work hard, to be diligent, to hurry, to push, to obtain something illegally, to engage in sex work) and ‘to idle’ (to laze around, to run empty, to lie fallow, to be unproductive). For each rotation, Ale Bachlechner slips into all the characters of a 1990s series’ opening credits, right down to the dog, with only a few props. In the process, collective visual memories, film language conventions and idiosyncratic longings and attributions overlap.

"This is how I want to be in the world. Like a character in a series’ opening credits. Defined by and identified with an activity that fulfils me completely, that I lose myself in, that conveys to everyone: “Oh, that's who they are!” And although I would actually be self-sufficiently occupied and content with that, I turn to the camera with a friendly smile, turn around, get into position and pause so that you can look at me. It is turning towards an audience, towards someone opposite me, whom I can trust to recognise me, who has been waiting for me. “Hello, it's me, your favourite character, do you remember me from yesterday? Today it's the same again, a new problem, a new solution, but just as always, typical me.”

A prelude that leads nowhere, a presentation of the already familiar, there is no development, at most exhaustion at some point.

Kathi Weeks writes in ‘The Problem with Work’ that instead of reflexively emphasising the social benefits or potential productivity of not working (for example, a four-day week increases efficiency and profitability in companies), it might be interesting to ask why there is such a great fear of unproductivity. She speculates that undisciplined ‘laziness’ has great disruptive potential and, above all, is fundamentally open-ended, thus also attacking our common identity constructs.

After several cycles, the image changes to a slow-motion shot of a woman lying on a huge artificial turf waterbed, gently rocking as unknown children play around her, but outside the frame. At the time, she was four months pregnant, had hardly slept the night before and was suffering from severe back pain. This image condenses various assumptions and attributions regarding the female body, gendered work, love, the nuclear family, reproductive work, the private and the public. (Text: Ale Bachlechner)

Ale Bachlechner is a performance and video artist living in Cologne and Vienna. She studied comparative literature in Innsbruck and audiovisual arts at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Her works include the temporary dating agency ‘Twelve Roses’ (2013), the performance coaching institute ‘This Is Not A Competition’ (2016), the online television format ‘Studio Hallo’ (2018), the performance and video installation ‘Ruin Your Life’ (2024/25) and a long-standing collaboration with Elsa Artmann/Ensemble ‘Sanfte Arbeit’.

Her work has been shown at Art Cologne, Videonale Bonn, EMAF in Osnabrück, DOKfest in Kassel, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Diagonale in Graz and WUK in Vienna, among others. Since 2016, she has held teaching positions at the Caspar David Friedrich Institute in Greifswald and the Bauhaus University in Weimar, among others. From 2018 to 2021, she was a member of the Young College of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her monograph ‘I'm Sure Everybody's Doing Their Best’ was published by DISTANZ Verlag.