HAPPY TEARS. VIDEO INSTALLATION, ONLINE PLATFORMS.
Digital meeting, performative fiction, video collage, communication breakdown, speculative togetherness.
HAPPY TEARS stages an online meeting where communication slowly unravels into absurdity. Four participants attempt to remain connected while drifting into entirely different realities. One floats through outer space. Others disappears beneath excessive makeup and alien features. Conversations dissolve into fragments, misunderstandings, and parallel monologues that never quite meet.
Hovering between workplace meeting, science fiction, and group therapy, the work embraces digital awkwardness as a site for collective imagination. As language fails, costumes, gestures, and impossible landscapes take over, transforming technological limitation into playful speculation.
Created at a moment when screens became the primary site of social life, HAPPY TEARS replaces the promise of seamless connection with a joyful collapse. The work asks what happens when being together no longer depends on understanding one another, and when escaping reality might be a collaborative act of fiction.
The recurring phrase “Book me a flight out of here” becomes less a request than a shared fantasy, drifting through the work like a pop refrain for bodies temporarily grounded yet already imagining elsewhere.
Book me a flight out of here.
What should we do with the time?
Counting, connecting, questioning, wondering.
Lost in other worlds, kept in hidden utopias.
We felt inspired – what about you?