VIDEO INSTALLATION, ONLINE PLATFORMS.
Fictional singer-songwriter, home video, cover version, performative authenticity, digital persona.
EVEN WHEN I LOSE I’M WINNING introduces Loretta (Lori) Manana, a fictional singer-songwriter broadcasting directly from her living room. Surrounded by lush houseplants and dressed as an improbable Carmen Miranda lookalike, she warmly encourages viewers to support her way of living while reflecting on her spirit animal and artistic journey with unwavering confidence.
Hovering between intimate home concert, crowdfunding campaign, self-help video, and character study, the work explores the performance of authenticity in online culture. Lori Manana appears completely convinced by her own mythology, inhabiting the familiar rituals of artistic self-branding with equal parts sincerity, optimism, and delusion. Success seems permanently just around the corner.
At the centre of the work is an attempt of covering Lamb’s 1997 single Górecki on a ukulele. Performed with complete emotional commitment, the song becomes another layer in Lori Manana’s carefully constructed identity, where devotion, aspiration, and imitation blur into a strangely believable pop fiction.
Released on online platforms, EVEN WHEN I LOSE I’M WINNING celebrates the hopeful absurdity of performing yourself into existence. Somewhere between earnest confession and affectionate satire, the work asks how much conviction it takes for a fictional artist to become real.
From subversive subject matter to affairs of the heart, female songwriters are often the most insightful. One of the exciting off-grid slow core’s great storytellers and one of the best female songwriters within this genre, Lori Manana stretches the boundaries of what a woman can say in a hit song – beginning with her first indie-label hit, ‘If I Should Die This Moment I Wouldn’t Fear Cause I’ve Never Known Completeness Like Being Here’, about downfall after heartbreak.