ZERSPLITTERUNG DES ICHS / FRAGMENTATION OF THE SELF
Video installation, 2026
Direction. Valia Lolidou
Performance. Aurora & Sasha Monusova
Music. Franco Lapache
In a time when digital technologies continuously record, alter, and reproduce our experiences, the boundaries between memory, image, and identity are becoming increasingly unstable.
Ich - Verdopplung. In Das Unheimliche, Freud discusses how the feeling of the uncanny arises from a return of repressed material and from a blurring between the self and the other. The double (der Doppelgänger) is one such figure: an externalized projection of part of the ego that feels both familiar and alien. The double was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego; an energetic denial of the power of death.
Ich - Vertauschung. Ich-Vertauschung means exchange or reversal of the ego. Freud uses it less often than the other two, but the concept appears in discussions of psychosis and identification. This term is also found in dreams or hypnosis, where the subject identifies so strongly with another that a Vertauschung (exchange) of identities seems to occur.
Ich - Teilung. Ich-Teilung means splitting of the ego, a concept Freud explicitly elaborates in his late essay “Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang” (Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence, 1938). The subject has, as it were, split his ego; one part has remained normal, while the other has been withdrawn from reality and has clung to the infantile wish.