«Humere» is a musical film that is currently on show (October 2024 to January 2025) in Johanna Kotlaris solo exhibition at Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana in Lugano in the context of the Manor Art Prize: https://johannakotlaris.com/humere.

The anti-heroine protagonist Humere who is a resurrected zombie woman whose experiences with humans perpetually urges one to think about the simplification of the binary victim-perpetrator logic as well as how a general exhaustion, increasing loss of hope and emotional repression have spread in late capitalism. Humere portrays a state of debilitation and poses the question of what a better future might look like, whether her return to the world of the living is really worth it or if being a zombie, unproductive and disobedient, should be respected as one’s individual choice. The film also raises the question of what responsibility we as individuals have to take in the fight against this exhaustion and in dealing with our own traumas, and where it is the responsibility of a society and the systems that rule it, to create spaces of healing and new beginnings.

In a world in which everyone revolves around their smiling in the shop window of social media, the promise of self-fulfillment since long has given way to compulsion. Main protagonist’s dark self-discovery starts in fine arts and heads into a Mephistophelian world of violence, exploring themes such as the cult of genius, toxic masculinity, isolation and (dis)connection, turning into a dangerous identity-political mission.

Skipping tells about the experience of being traumatized even after traveling to a safe place, ignoring definition of objective geography. The film oscillates around childhood, dreams and the relation with hallucinations, trying to navigate in a new society, alienated.

A poetry film, which portrays the quiet, lonely work of a labyrinth guide, whose profession is without any specialisation and yet questions all other professions. With no recognisable employers, with time as the only reward, the labyrinth guide is a phantom in the performance society. Invisible to surveillance cameras, uncatchable for the authorities. All the more so because the existence of his workplace, the labyrinth, is vehemently denied.

Audio-visual work created during the festival Female Voice of Iran depicting fight for freedom, inner poetry, eternal conflict of fear and desire.