Simulacrum is a magazine for art and culture, with an editorial team consisting entirely of Amsterdam-based students. Each year, the magazine launches four thematic issues that explore their themes through art, essays, articles, performances and more. To celebrate the launch of the next volume Nightmare – released halfway through May – film theater Kriterion and Simulacrum join forces for an evening of art, film and music. The evening starts with a performance by Berlin artist Ruin Klaity. After the performance there is a film screening: Freak Orlando (1981), dir. Ulrike Ottinger. Freak Orlando is a 1981 West German film directed by Ulrike Ottinger. In the form of a “small theater of the world”, a history of the world from its beginnings to our day, including the errors, the incompetence, the thirst for power, the fear, the madness, the cruelty and the commonplace, in a story of five episodes. Ulrike Ottinger transforms Virginia Woolf’s queer feminist classic ORLANDO into an outrageous camp spectacle in which a gender-fluid time traveler (Magdalena Montezuma) zigzags across history—from medieval times to the modern day—over the course of five episodes. The great Delphine Seyrig costars in this flamboyant fantasy epic that blends everything from Greek mythology to Tod Browning’s FREAKS into a defiantly queer, carnivalesque historical pageant. The performance is called Night Terror by Ruin Klarity. Ruin is hooker, writer and vocalist with a pussy made of yearning hot glass. Her writing is what she is ready to let go of, and what will never leave her. In Nightmare, Simulacrum explores the meaning and appearance of the nightmare. Over the centuries, the nightmare has haunted humanity in many ways: in psychology, medicine, language, literature, art, and more. The authors of Nightmare all relate to the theme in their own specific ways. For example, author Jonas van Kappel writes about the surreal experience of the art installation Untitled (Havana, 2000) by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera; Jérémy Bernard on one’s own confusing, chaotic experience of dreaming; and Neza Kokol on the everyday appearance of the nightmare, in places where you might least expect it. This volume aims to show that nightmares – as something that typically bring up feelings of fear and discomfort – can also be a source of inspiration for new art and thoughts. -- (Text and image)

https://www.kriterion.nl/films/simulacrum-x-kriterion-freak-orlando