Stefan Panhans &
Andrea Winkler &

Anima Overdrive

The overdrive is a state of heightened intensity, of working at full capacity. It’s often associated with machines, particularly engines, where ›overdrive‹ refers to the gear that pushes the system beyond its normal limits. Anima Overdrive uses delivery services as a metaphor to portray our contemporary condition as turbo consumers of goods, as individuals pushed past a tolerable threshold, who have reached a state of mental and bodily exhaustion. Within an economic system that has commodified nearly everything, making these products ›deliverables‹ anywhere, anytime, and as quickly as possible has been a more recent frontier. The Covid-19 pandemic heavily contributed to intensifying this addiction; packages pile up at doorsteps, in basements, and are constantly returned, reordered and redelivered, in a Sisyphean cycle fueled by exploited workers and excessive consumption.

In Anima Overdrive, a performer ›delivers‹ a rap from a raided basement storage room, listing items available for delivery—from tangible goods (»I deliver liver«) to abstract concepts (»I deliver liveness«). The piece quotes Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters (1991), often seen as a love song, but at its core, it is about burnout and the strain on personal connections as the creative industry demands more. In an era of constant digital connectivity and instant consumption, our activity shifts increasingly to screens, while physical spaces are left behind, and deliverers bear the burden with their bodies. The performer, in a battered quarterback outfit, symbolizes the exhausted deliverers in constant motion, caught in a cycle of labor, fatigue, and exploitation. Anima Overdrive is a commentary on the physical toll that contemporary capitalism’s demands impose on both the body and the spirit. (Vanina Saracino)

Funded by: Berliner Senatsverwaltung

Images: Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler, Anima Overdrive, 2023 © Stefan Panhans & Andrea Winkler

About the artists

Stefan Panhans *1967 in Hattingen, GER, lives and works in Hamburg, GER, and Berlin, GER. Studied at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, GER, and at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, GER
Andrea Winkler *1975 in Fällanden, SUI, lives and works in Berlin, GER, and Hamburg, GER. Studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (UCL), London, GBR, and the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, GER
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About the Work

Length 00:04:18

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