lili süper

the service

december 14, 2025 - january 10, 2026

We have gone quite far now, through the tar, and through the mud as well. Decay is everywhere, especially farther down below. We’ve tried everything to protect ourselves from it. We come from the abandoned farms. We have always supported what needed support: the exhausted apple trees in the Old Land, the limbs. When we came through the open field, we picked up a body and hung it up to dry. It is a Chinese rubber body without a gaze. Its jacket looks as though the body once had a function, was in service, stood in someone’s service. In whose service? We’re constantly being signaled. We can’t decipher it. We dream of the haystacks of the farms, which are now deserted. If we could, we would lay the body in the hay to dry. The body hangs on the stakes—or is it kneeling, devout? It is resting, dripping out, getting ready for the next service.

We walk through the streets of the cities, through the paths of the fields. We observe all the places we see. We observe the surface of the earth. Simply for its protection, for its safety. If we want, we can see only the heat in the landscape, or only the water, or only the salt. We extract the data the way we think is important. We filter the information the way we find it beautiful, until we find it truly beautiful. We drill with our metallic eyes into the subtleties of this thin, crispy crust. Then we feed everything we know and see into the weaving machine. The weaving machine produces the yarn, and the yarn shows us everything: where it is salty, where it is dry, where it is hot, where it is high. That is one way the landscape image can look, but it can also look completely different if we focus on another aspect. Every pixel becomes a stitch. The loom principle became the computer principle; now we are reversing it again. Every stitch represents a value, a datum that we measured sometime, somewhere. From the server the yarn comes back—multicolored, never-ending—into their world, which lies before us.

We move on. The service is running. Lili is one of us now. She has turned herself into a bot and has become part of the city infrastructure of the bots who offer their services. We are an entire army out here. As an interface between the layers of reality, we offer ourselves: we receive assignments from the digispace and carry them out in the material world. Under precarious, isolated, dangerous working conditions, we maintain the city’s consumption structure. Even if one tries to suppress this notion of “we,” we are a we. But Lili is only pretending; Lili only acts as if she were a bot. She will wash the blue paint off again and then become human again, while we others are in here forever—unless someone switches us off..

kaija knauer

watch the service here: https://youtu.be/qpO4u96vfqA?si=427GqZ5r9-aDFK9H

Lili Süper’s works are interested in creating access again within dissociated relations to the world and to the self.

In her works, the self, bodies, landscapes, datasets, and digital technologies themselves can become the object of investigation.

An important part of Lili’s artistic practice is her understanding of, and her work with, medial representation. The geomapping software that was used within the framework of the Copernicus Program for the surveying of landscapes is the same software with which Lili workes in her pieces and on a digital surveying of bodies. Bodies, self, and world are subjected to the same technology. Technology here is a tool of dissociation: “the thing itself” is decoupled from itself and transformed into a dataset, an image, a molding.

But Süper’s works do not remain in dissociation: she looks because she wants to see something; she zooms in to be closer; she makes molds in order to then hold something in her hands.
It is a devoted practice that wants to enter into connection. She transforms the skills of her digital practice into the analogue realm: in the use of high-quality natural materials for the ropes, or of posts from the Hanseatic Alten Land, lies the desire for haptics, for grip, and for grounding. In the performance, Lili intervenes in the everyday life of the urban space and makes her body available to the viewers in a long-durational setting. In doing so, she gives away a rare resource: her presence.

Lili Süper was born in 1997 in Bremen and studied Fine Arts and Stage Design at HFBK Hamburg and in the Postgraduate Program Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths College in London.