Montewood Hollyveritá is a video film combining Monte Verita and Hollywood. Monte Verita, the mountain of truth, was founded in the early 1900’s in Switzerland by reformers, vegetarians, writers, musicians, dancers, revolutionaries, psychoanalysts, emancipators, architects, theosophists, and anarchists, people who wanted to make the world a better place.

I relocated the Monte Veritá in Hollywood to give it a real star attitude, play with the myths, placed it in today’s time and recreated various characters from Monte Verità using different artists.

The founders of the Monte Veritá Ida Hofmann and Henri Oedenkoven are interpreted by two major bodybuilders, Pauliina Talus and Tommi Thorvildsen. The physically intense dancer and dance teacher Rudolf von Laban is played by Jason Rhoades; Elisar von Kupffer, the homosexual writer, painter and lover striving for an androgynous paradise, by Paul McCarthy and the anarchist and bohemian Erich Muehsam is played by Udo Kier. The wealthy Baron Emden, who surrounded himself with beautiful naked female delicatessen made to enjoy themselves coquettishly in his garden is played by Lawrence Weiner, to name a few.

—description by Una Szeemann