This interview was conducted by Livia Klein.
Capsules of Olivia Rode Hvass and Miriam Schmidtke
This year, you are both part of the Capsules section at Luxembourg Art Week. Could you tell us what you are presenting there?
Miriam: At Capsules, I present The Manifesto of Post-Phlegmatism, a text centering on a speculative cult that reframes apathy, stagnation, and especially sleep as radical tools against capitalism’s demands. A luminous lightbox proclaims the slogan “There’s nothing soft about needing more than eight hours of sleep”, while a spoken-word manifesto, set to music by Albert van Veenendaal, vibrates through the storefront glass. To hear it, one must lean in, turning the passerby into a participant. The manifesto critiques the obsession with ceaseless productivity and instead celebrates lethargy, idleness, and withdrawal as strategies of survival. Some encounter it as ironic, others as soothing or provocative. Installed in a display window, it interrupts consumption with a tableau of refusal: it sells nothing but stillness, sleep, and slowness—a mythological gateway towards quiet resistance.
And what about you, Olivia?
Olivia: I am presenting Hunt(ed), an installation of three digital-jacquard woven tapestries with hay and withering sunflowers. The works rewrite the medieval La chasse à la licorne (Hunt of the Unicorn), a story of nobles capturing the unicorn. My version shifts perspectives: the unicorn becomes a teenage My Little Pony-like horse, bleeding, crying, hiding, while the hunters appear as scarecrows—figures meant to protect, but also to exclude. Some works in the series show the horse’s escape and freedom. In making these works, I reflected on the messages embedded in epic histories and their political, colonial, and ecological consequences. This presentation of Hunt(ed), curated by Çağla Erdemir, focuses on the scenes of the hunt and the ambivalent figure of the scarecrow.
Both of your projects touch on ideas of ritual and myth. What draws you to these frameworks?
Olivia: To me, especially myths and the mystical are interesting for several reasons. I find the space between real and unreal, facts and fiction, intriguing because it contains what we can’t explain, spaces we try to grasp, emotions we try to comprehend. To me, it holds a space for the deeply existential. There is poetry and imagination in the things we don’t understand. I also like how it becomes a language for culture, societal morals, and what we deem important in the world, and it’s interesting to look at our current place in history and see connections to the myths and religious texts of the past. When growing up in what feels like an era of crisis, I find it quite natural to seek explanations and alternatives. I find this in a mix of the historical, mystical, and magical. It’s both a space for comfort and critique. A space to think differently.
How do you see this, Miriam?
Miriam: I turn to ritual and myth because they reach beyond the rational, they tap into memory and into emotions that we all share. Nowadays, we binge myths on screens, but we rarely inhabit them. This reveals both a loss and a hunger. We still crave these narratives, but we encounter them in flattened forms. Myth provides archetypes that help us explore timeless questions of transcendence, but also the internal dilemmas of today’s life.
In my work, the frameworks of myth and ritual allow me to bypass purely intellectual interpretation. They draw me because they are older than reason, even older than language. They carry memory that does not belong to one person, but to all of us. Myths and rituals have a psychological force because they speak in symbols, they bypass reason, and they can slip directly into the unconscious, where fears and desires are stored in their purest form.
Miriam, in The Manifesto of Post-Phlegmatism you describe sleep as a collective act of resistance. How did this idea emerge?
I am a woman in late capitalism, so of course I am very tired. I love to sleep, because in sleep I am finally not a useful body—not a resource, not a commodity, not an object to be measured or optimized. Sleep suspends the demands to perform, produce, or be available. In a world that commodifies even our dreams, loving sleep becomes defiance. It is the one space where I can withdraw from extraction, exist without function, simply as a body at rest. That uselessness is a form of freedom. I wish that for everyone.
To rest is a privilege, that is the paradox we live in. Capitalism has turned something as basic as sleep into a luxury commodity. Some can afford silence and comfort, others are denied even the right to rest. To reclaim sleep as resistance is not to romanticize it, but to expose this inequality. I imagine a world where rest is no longer a privilege but a right, where the exhausted body is not punished and slowing down is not weakness but liberation. In The Manifesto of Post-Phlegmatism, these thoughts become a provocation: if rest is a privilege, then to demand it together is already an act of rebellion.
Why was the format of a Manifesto important to you?
This format was important because it refused neutrality. A manifesto does not ask politely; it demands. Yet by pairing it with lethargy and sleep, I wanted to create a paradox: a manifesto that calls for revolution not through speed and violence, but through withdrawal, stillness, and dreaming. Framing the work as a speculative cult stretches it beyond language. A manifesto declares, but a cult embodies—through gestures, symbols, and shared imagination. In a culture where myths have eroded and community is mediated by consumerism or digital platforms, the cult becomes a way of imagining togetherness. In the Manifesto, I position myself as the “dark princess of the couch,” both an exaggeration of the self and a mythic archetype, like a sovereign who claims her kingdom in horizontal posture. Writing in the first person turns the text into a spoken spell. What begins as confession—what I want, reject, desire—becomes an invitation for others to articulate their own refusals. Not to literally join a cult, but to share the exhaustion and the wish to withdraw.
And Olivia, in Hunt(ed) you revisit the unicorn from the medieval hunting tapestries. Why did you choose to transform it into a grounded horse?
I just think this othering became quite present in “The Hunt of the Unicorn”—the unicorn became an object of lust, of something to possess. And I feel it's because of its magical status of beauty. Like a beautiful flower, you want it. Like a woman? There's a fine line between lust/possessiveness and othering something. Making something magical—exotic, different—can sometimes be a way of othering something/someone. It's easier to want to possess it if it's not something you relate to. My idea was to take away the horn, to make it more grounded and relatable somehow. Less “exotic” and objectified.
Your works also bring in the scarecrow as another central figure. Having just described the unicorn as both objectified and grounded, how do you see the scarecrow’s own ambivalence—as guardian and threat—playing out in this story?
To me, the scarecrow both represents the hunter, in the original tapestries, and also the given caretakers/caregivers today. Like the state(police, welfare systems, etc), all meant to protect, but it very much depends on your status in society - whether you're homeless or house owner, refugee or native, sick or not. The scarecrow contains that ambivalence - protecting the land, for example, but scaring the birds. Keeping someone out and something safe. I thought that was an interesting duality - and I also love the way they look.
After speaking about your specific works, I’d like to return to some of the broader ideas that connect your practices. Both of you work with myth, ritual, and symbolic figures, but also with the question of what these frameworks can mean in today’s world. How do you think rituals can shape communities today?
Miriam: We have lost many of our myths and rituals, or we have forgotten how to listen to them. In modern life, ritual has been reduced to routine, and myth to entertainment. We live in a time where old myths no longer hold us, yet the hunger, the longing for their consoling capacities, has not disappeared. We will always need rituals, not as escapism, but as vessels that can help us hold the contradictions of our present life. In a time when so many feel dulled, rituals serve aspossibilities of depth and consolidation. Capitalism reduces repetition to monotony: clocking in, producing, consuming, sleeping just enough to repeat it all. But ritual repetition is different; it creates intensity rather than exhaustion. By repeating gestures with intention, we carve out a space that resists the erosion of life into mere productivity.
Does this resonate with you, Olivia?
Olivia: Yes, indeed. I am worried about the state the world is in right now. About war and fascism. About the Palestinian people—and also very much about the reaction and carelessness regarding the genocide by my country, and most european countries—about the resources being used up, people burning out, capitalistic focus on individualistic expression and goals, about economic “growth”, and how one thing takes the focus from another. I think connecting makes a lot of sense right now. To think about community more than the self. But perhaps more so in doing community work, helping each other and going to the streets to demonstrate.
You’ve just described this urgency around community and resistance in very concrete, political terms. In your artistic practice, myth often becomes a tool for questioning power. How do you see the connection between storytelling and resistance?
Olivia: Myths have been a way to describe and understand the world, to understand morals, and to explain existence. It's a way to speak about the framework, the structure through poetry and imagination. Today, we might not see the myths as explanations to why the sun rises, or why you should not enter a cold river, but I still find that fictional worlds, spaces, stories, create places people can enter, with an open mind, ready to imagine new connections in reality—in fiction you are more ready to take your own prejudice away, and open to look into new opportunities, other ways to think, to do things, other characters to care for. I think this fictional space has quite a lot of potential.
Building on what Olivia said—Miriam, what’s your take, especially from a feminist point of view?
Miriam: Throughout history, storytelling has always been entangled with resistance. While myths and epics often legitimized kings and patriarchs, counter-stories emerged in the margins. Folktales carried hidden critiques of power, and oral traditions preserved knowledge that official histories tried to erase. From a feminist perspective, this is crucial, since women were so often written out of the “great myths” or reduced to temptresses, victims, or muses. Retelling these stories from the perspective of the silenced, or inventing new narratives, becomes a weapon of imagination. Myth is double-edged: it can empower, but it has also justified persecution. The figure of the witch is a clear example—mythologized as monstrous, she became the projection of collective fear, while in reality, many practiced healing, midwifery, and communal care. To demonize them was also to attack networks of survival outside patriarchal control. Counter-myths have always existed, often in secret, as rituals of resistance. Storytelling, then, is also care—restoring dignity to those erased and complexity to those cast out as villains.
You both describe how myths can question power and even work as tools of resistance. That made me wonder: when these ideas enter into space, into your installations, do you see them as sites of contemplation, confrontation, or perhaps both?
Miriam: Contemplation, because I want to create atmospheres where the audience can slow down. Confrontation, because these same spaces are not neutral. To break through the conditions of our time, both movements are required: the inward, reflective gaze and the sharp encounter with intensity. Ideally, my installations function as thresholds where stillness and disturbance coexist, where one can feel held and provoked, or soothed and unsettled at the same time.
Olivia: I feel like it probably is more of a space of contemplation and reflection, even though I often really like when work can confront the viewer's own bias, etc. But I am not sure my own work does that, not as the first thing at least—I think it’s looking more into the structural, fictional, moods, emotions. Some people might find it confrontational, but it’s not a common reaction in my experience, which is also not my goal—I hope instead to make people feel, reflect, and maybe even care.
How does the Capsules setting—and its storefront presentation in the city—shape the way you think about your installations?
Miriam: Presenting The Manifesto of Post-Phlegmatism in a commercial window felt almost inevitable, because the piece is already working with the language of advertising. The luminous sign resembles a slogan, but one that refuses productivity. In Luxembourg, a city so tied to finance and commerce, this gesture becomes sharper. The window normally seduces with promises of luxury, but here it vibrates with stillness. I like this irony: that refusal enters the very space designed to sell.
Olivia: For Hunt(ed), the storefront creates a strange but powerful stage. The tapestries, the hay, the withering sunflowers—they are not in a white cube, but in a place where people pass by on their way to shop or work. That friction interests me, because the work itself deals with structures of desire and exclusion. Showing it in a window makes the scarecrow and the hunted horse feel even more ambivalent: they are visible, exposed, almost like actors in a play of protection and threat.
What do you hope will stay with viewers after they encounter your works?
Miriam: I don’t expect people to leave with a fixed message. What I hope lingers is a sensation—a small aftertaste of refusal. Maybe they remember leaning into the glass, realizing that the window itself was whispering. That intimacy, that moment of slowing down, is already resistance.
Olivia: For me, it would be a feeling of care, even if fragile. These are not heroic stories, but vulnerable ones. If people stop and sense that vulnerability—whether it makes them sad, reflective, or protective—then I think the work has opened a space for empathy. That’s what I would like to stay with them.
Thank you both!
