Lovely Andrea

Lovely Andrea relates to the search for a photography taken in Tokyo around 1987. The photo shows the artist half naked and tied up, a bondage picture in the nawa-shibari style, characterised by women bound and suspended in the air. Today Japanese bondage is a subgenre of pornography. But it developed from the martial arts, hojojutsu being the act of using of a rope to capture, transport and torture criminals. An aestetic act from the start, only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did it acquire a sensual and erotic dimension. But in a wider context, there is bondage all over the place , the video states at one point, to the accompainment of a montage of Japanese bondage girls, the American superhero Spiderman and bound captives in the US-detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay. By associatively linking desire and bondage, voluntary subjection and captivity, dependencies, networks, complicity, and cliques, Steyerl creates a polysemous play of thought: Who are the string pullers? Who are the puppets? How do things stand with the pictures? Bondage in Lovely Andrea is a universal metaphor.