FELIX LENZ: Soft Image, Brittle Grounds

With the mixed-media installation Soft Image, Brittle Grounds, research-led artist and filmmaker Felix Lenz exposes the material and political implications of technological image- and knowledge production, revealing how the complexity of the world collides with the reductive rationalities of the digital age.

The 30-minute essay film Brute Force [Exhibition Cut] (2025) traces the infrastructures and instruments that capture and process images and data—from subatomic particles to planetary-scale imaging—revealing their environmental impact and geological imprints. Filmed across multiple countries, including key scenes at the salt lakes and salt deserts of Utah and California, the film approaches salt as an archive of the absence of water. Brute Force was co-directed with Ganaël Dumreicher.

The newly developed three-channel video installation Valley of the Heart’s Delight (2025) performs a shift from the planetary to the local and situated. The title references the historical name of the once fertile land, now known as Silicon Valley. Captured through the lens of an industrial robotic arm, layers of soil and crushed white shells evoke the sacred shellmounds of the Indigenous Ohlone people: Burial grounds and remnants of ancestral life that now lie hidden beneath corporate headquarters. Behind the smooth façades of technocratic ideologies, the installation reveals the ongoing erasure of marginalized voices and cultures.