RUIN YOUR LIFE

Ruin Your Life
Video and performance installation

How can a life be summarized? As an inspiring success story, romantic comedy, heroic struggle, great disappointment or simply a complete mess? At the latest during the eulogy, it becomes clear which decisions, which events and which characteristics the bereaved consider relevant.
In Ruin Your Life, the audience encounters installative video works and performative miniatures about the many ways in which life can be ruined. Moments of direct exchange with the performers invite them to take a humorous and critical look at powerful norms and ideologies, their own hopes and experiences, but also deterrent examples and the relentless economy of (living) time.

Crying and lying are classic, ruinous behaviors, tried and tested many times and passed down through generations. Just like binary gender roles or deeply internalized work ethics with their complex mixture of compulsion and choice, necessity and desire, habit and intention. Of course, this doesn't make for a compelling story, even if we try endlessly. With their participatory performance and video installation Ruin Your Life, Ale Bachlechner and Ensemble offer an individually explorable kaleidoscope of fragments: Unreliable narrators report on tearful mother-daughter relationships, ruins of masculinity are explored, birthdays, weddings and funerals are celebrated, babies or pets are acquired. There is always something to miss or wrong decisions to make.
Ale Bachlechner counters the concept of the fastest possible, linear and progressive sequence of milestones in both private and professional life with the figure of the late bloomer, who reaches these milestones late, in the wrong order or never. What "life plans" are conceivable and liveable instead of the two classics of family and/or career? If the promises of "the good life" do not (or no longer) materialize anyway, can we perhaps begin to set up a life in the ever-present threat of total and self-inflicted ruin?

Format information: The performance and video installation will be open for five hours on the four days of the event. Admission is at fixed times. Visitors can stay in the installation as long as they like, or leave it and come back. A stay of at least one hour is recommended. Depending on their preference, the audience can actively participate or remain observers. German and English spoken and written language will be used in the multimedia installation.

Admission times:

Saturday 27.09.2025: 17:00 | 17:30 | 18:00 | 18:30 | 19:00 | 19:30 | 20:00 | 20:30

Sunday 28.09.2025: 16:00 | 16:30 | 17:00 | 17:30 | 18:00 | 18:30 | 19:00 | 19:30

Saturday 04.10.2025: 17:00 | 17:30 | 18:00 | 18:30 | 19:00 | 19:30 | 20:00 | 20:30

Sunday 05.10.2025: 16:00 | 16:30 | 17:00 | 17:30 | 18:00 | 18:30 | 19:00 | 19:30

Credits:
Concept, direction and video works: Ale Bachlechner / development and performance: Ale Bachlechner, Isa Conrady, Bryce Kasson, Jonathan Kastl, Olivia Platzer / technical concept: Jonathan Kastl / music: Bryce Kasson, Jonathan Kastl / production: Milena Rosiny, frankaflux, IMAI Inter Media Art Institut, Glasmoog

Supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia in the Media Art Fund.