The Disco Balls of Plenty are a series of illuminated, rotating sculptures made mostly from objects found in the urban space. Many small metal, glas and plastic objects reflect part of their stories and experiences into the surrounding space. The result is a small archaeology of our way of life in a multitude of constantly changing shapes and colors.

In the video installation, the theme of the Babylonian confusion is examined by body language. Two people are seemingly communicating with each other, but in fact they are in their own conversation not really reacting to each other.

In the performative video installation Take a breath, the artist immerses himself in the Danube in the Bulgarian-Romanian border region – a river that connects him to his home country. The result is an audiovisual reflection on the agency of the river, which connects human and non-human activities over great distances.

The video installation was created during the Water Tower Art Residency in Lom, Bulgaria, in 2024, and was presented at Lom Art Gallery.

Video installation, Full HD, Sound, 2 min 47 sec, diverse materials, Lom (Bulgaria) 2024

The video installation Außer Betrieb is a column-like sculpture consisting mainly of steel springs from a mattress. It shows a short video that is intended to depict the subjective feeling of a sleepless night in an experimental way.

Installation, pieces of broken glass, spotlight, disco ball engine, Berlin 2023

Installation, broken car mirrors, spotlight, disco ball engine, Berlin/Sofia 2023

Gazing out into the horizon, setting your eyes upon the edge of the world. This edge is not a fixed one, if you move it moves with you. Although it exists only in your perception, it governs it nevertheless and orients your movement through the world. It governs perception the same way the horizon point structures every other point in the perspectival image. The edge does not exist, yet it gives structure, it gives life.

The title I can’t go on. I’ll go on. is a quote from Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. Like the book, which consists of an incoherent inner monologue, the video in the installation amounts to nothing. The person in the black room, which is far too small for him, does not seem to be part of a larger world in which he actively participates. Within this confining framework he would be free to do whatever he wants but instead he just lives on without much happening.

What can I learn from a landscape? What are its processes? What are the processes of its human and non-human inhabitants? And what are my processes when I am in the landscape? What is going on when I walk through the landscape? How can the many insights a landscape holds be perceived and recorded?

“J. Schroeder is interested here in river travel, and more specifically in the fact that it has enabled explorers and ethnographers to penetrate otherwise inaccessible lands. Like the ocean, the river is an essential component of the colonial conquest, with the difference that it is situated in the very heart of the unknown. This is what has notably nourished the dramaturgy of films such as Fitzcarraldo, Deliverance, or Apocalypse Now, where the thread of the river accompanies the narrative development of the film. By juxtaposing a selection of ethnographic archives […] with the experience of his own descent of the Rhône, Janis Lew Schroeder deals with the origins and persistence of discourses produced over centuries by the civilising West.“

The photos show the professional processing of nine different materials: stone, wood, metal, leather, cotton, glass, electricity, photo film, and plastic. In this way they speak about the interaction of hand, machine, and material. The images are juxtaposed with recordings carried out in workshops of the sounds of machines and tools, mixed with conversations the artist had with the craftsmen during their work. Every encounter brings up the same initial question: How has their work changed over time since they started their profession? Very different conversations develop, sometimes longer and more detailed, sometimes very short and concise.

Versuch einer Gegenüberstellung von historischen und aktuellen Stadtraumfragen [Attempt on a confrontation of historic and current questions about urban space]

During this festival held in the ruins of a soccer stadium in Zurich, a living room comes into being in the entrance corridor of the former stadium. In this living room, an old television screens historic video interviews made in the 1980s on the streets of the Swiss German cities of Zurich, Basel, and Bern. During the interviews, passers-by comment on squatted houses of these times – sometimes in a positive manner, sometimes hostile. The interviews are part of a documentary produced at that time by the squatters themselves and come from Swiss Social Archives in Zurich.

The three chapters of this video installation play in three cities in the Ruhr region of Germany. There are three protagonists of different generations walking down the pedestrian streets of these cities on foot. A long camera movement shows them only from behind, their eyes fixed on what they have in front of them. They tell personal stories related to the emergence and appropriation of public space, as well as the region’s history of coal mining.

Insects such as spiders, grasshoppers, flies, and a praying mantis are inside board game boxes. Isolated from the environment, they are projected on the three different board games, which lay abandoned on the ground.

Five people live in five boxes. They are filmed while they do their everyday activities. Long cables connect cameras with a panel of screens on which the spectator can see what is happening inside the boxes. The spectator is filmed as well, and can see himself on a sixth screen.