Road Trip, Fieldwork, and Haunting Images

Cyrill Lachauer (b. Rosenheim, 1979; lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles) is a connoisseur of traces; he studied anthropology and film before deciding to devote all his energies to visual art. His works are the results of extended trips that have led him from America's flyover country-a part of the world that has recently received a great deal of media attention-to his own roots in Upper Bavaria and Berlin. He explores regions and places, probing the transformation of signifiers and artifacts and the ways in which tradition and heritage inform our cultural imagination. His photographs, films, and writings spotlight blanks, quotations, and ostensibly insignificant details, reading them as traces of histories that lie buried in the landscapes and continue to shape them. The exhibition and book What Do You Want Here premiere a cycle of works the artist created as he traveled the United States over the past two years. The film Dodging Raindrops-A Separate Reality is the ensemble's centerpiece. It opens in Los Angeles and retraces the purported research expeditions of the controversial ethnologist Carlos Castaneda, who became one of the founding fathers of the New Age movement. Observations along the Mississippi blend with fictional situations and historical references for a polyphonic narrative that proffers an enlarged experience of the landscapes the journey passes through. With essays by Guido Faßbender, Alexander Knorr, Thomas Köhler, and Cyrill Lachauer.