While Our Parents Worked for Wages  

The artist trio Mizi Lee, Y-Thanh Vo and Julius Nägele invite children to recapitulate the cultural genre of mecha in the art context and do a workshop by making them. They will build mechas out of old cardboard boxes, reminiscent of childhood artists with Japanese anime that the audience can actually climb on and control. Artist Julius Nägele will contribute a few kinetic movements to these mechas. We would like to share our joy and enthusiasm from our childhood with people who are either also enthusiastic about it or have not yet had any points of contact with it.

The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.

Donna Haraway, 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”

In the small pause of all these wars in Southeast Asia – not only the Second and Cold Wars, but also the Korean War and the Vietnam War – the aesthetics of the subculture in South Korea was characterized by cyberpunk and the turn of the century. The Baby Boomer generation, who were supposed to rebuild the country, had to work without breaks and weekends, their children sat in front of the television instead of going for walks in nature with their parents. Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop, Gundam or Neon Genesis Evangelion were on the television. The children knelt down to watch the heroes transform, for example with Sailor make-up or by enlarging Gundam to save the world. These metamorphoses were then always accompanied by very impressive orchestral music. For the artist Mizi Lee, this was Don Giovanni or Fidelio and its culture. For her, this means culture and not subculture, as it is just as significant as the Eurocentric canonized high culture. While our parents were working, children were able to consume culture and keep themselves busy in this cheap way. That's how the idea for the theme came about: we want to preserve our identity despite our anger and frustration about classism or elitism. This is how we celebrate what we loved back then. In conversations, Mizi and Y-Thanh realized that although they grew up on two different continents, they spent a very similar childhood, as both of their families worked in the catering industry and they put these observations into a social and critical context.

The anime produced in Japan between the 1970s and 1990s strongly addressed the trauma of the post-war period from the perspective of the perpetrators. Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion, seemingly the only young man who can save the world – like Neo in Matrix – refuses to get on the robot to kill people and eventually decides to give up the fight. The final episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion is known for its abstractness, which was not common for children's animation at the time. The audience is invited to enter his soul, and the anime uses alternating abstract images to show his confusion as the hero he does not want to be. Long before Donna Haraway wrote A Cyborg Manifesto and proposed the cyborg as a border crosser between man and machine, the synchronicity between man and robot was already being addressed in so-called cyberpunk manga and anime in the 1950s. Astro Boy Atom (1952–1968) by Tezuka Osamu was intended to replace the developer's son and was discarded by him because he did not grow like human boys. A common staging of science fiction manga is also that the pilot is injured when the robot is damaged where it was attacked, unlike Iron Man or Batman – the robots are not simply armor resting on the body, but are an extension of the vulnerable body. The bond between the pilot and the machine is therefore very important. This concept reached its climax in the resolution of the mystery behind the battle robots in the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion – namely, the robots were created from the womb of the pilot's own mother. Mindless, cold machines suddenly become the warm womb of the mother and one feels blessed behind the back of the strong, large machines. Mecha is the name of the genre of an East Asian subculture, derived from anime culture and cyberpunk films, in which large robots are depicted as humanoid figures. 

MIZI LEE  uses all kinds of media and crosses the boundaries of all disciplines to create a unique event. Sometimes she founds a fake supermarket to print brochures full of artworks, sometimes she screams in a punk band in Berlin's Kulturbrauerei or in an old train at Stuttgart's Nordbahnhof. She works in an interdisciplinary collective because she believes that artworks require more than just one artist. In 2022, Lee founded the punk band Horizontaler Gentransfer (HGT), with which she performs projects that lie at the interface of visual art, performance and theater.

Y-THANH VÕ  has been studying communication design with Patrick Thomas at ABK Stuttgart since 2017. She has produced print design and social media design for Komma Esslingen, Merlin Stuttgart and Container't, among others. She works across different fields – occasionally DJing at music festivals such as New Normal, collaborating with other artists or giving workshops for children. Since 2021, she has been part of the student initiative cute und artsy, a group at the art academy that deals with issues of various forms of discrimination.

JULIUS NÄGELE works with various media, including kinetics and printmaking. His prints can currently be seen in the exhibition Stand Jetzt by winners of the Walter Stöhrer Prize for Graphics. The walk-in automatic instrument “T.O” was presented after two and a half years of construction in the Gäubahnatelier G2 of the Wagenhalle Stuttgart.