Yasmin Ritschl

“DAS IST SO AUTHENTISCH!” (THAT’S SO AUTHENTIC!)

My current research wants to fathom the anchoring of authenticity in our world of social perception: the search for and esteem of the authentic, and the wish dormant therein to get as near as possible to that which is true to itself, still untouched, or standing by itself. One might think that we have tried to distance ourselves from tradition, deconstruct it, position ourselves post-of, or just follow the dialectics of this undertaking. We want to see ourselves as enlightened – in the belief that this or that is a thing of the past – yet we are still yearning for the promise of finding something authentic somewhere in this process: something which briefly gives us a taste of security and eternity because of its genuineness, its peculiarity, its being true to itself. Authenticity serves as the image of a paradisiac time out, as ideal of the person standing wholly by itself. How does this movement stabilise? Why do we again and again follow the seemingly dazzling lustre of authenticity? What is it? And how is the mass production of authenticity connected with a search for one’s own expression? Tracing these inconsistencies of the call for authenticity not only tries to make them visible, but also to create a tool making individual inconsistency accessible and plumbable.

YASMIN RITSCHL (DE/AT), born in 1991 in Munich, in her childhood enjoyed a Montessori education and temporarily lived in Barcelona, Berlin, London, Paris, and Philadelphia. In 2011 she chose Vienna as her city and place of study. Since then she has mainly occupied herself with dealing in-depth with various philosophical trains of thought and psychoanalytic theories. She is a founding member of the collective philosophy unbound, in whose framework she organises its regular performance evenings, and currently is researching authenticity in the framework of the Stoffwechsel project.