Baden-Baden’s morbid magnificence was an excellent framework for the melancholy/ironic combination of rented brilliance and fragile creativity described in Rebecca Horn’s La Ferdinanda: Sonata for a Medici Villa. This film was premiered in conjunction with an installation, of the same name, displaying objects from the film; this connection between video and film on the one hand and objects used as props on the other has for years been characteristic of Horn’s artistic praxis.

Until the early ’70’s, objects related mainly to the body served as instruments of social experience of the self in Horn’s