»Venus Matinee« | Tim Ra & Jens Strüver

The Angela Davis Fertility Clinic is laboratory, sanctuary, and space station all at once. Inside, technology, ritual, and care merge into a new social architecture. Women are received, accompanied, and prepared for the transition. Medical procedures pass almost imperceptibly into liturgical acts. Pregnancy appears not as a private destiny, but as a communal practice. Something new is being born — not just children, but a different vision of society.

The name of the clinic says it all. Angela Davis embodies the connection between feminism, anti-racism, and social liberation like few other thinkers. Accordingly, the clinic does not view care as the administration of female bodies, but rather as an infrastructure of emancipation. Freedom appears here neither as boundless individuality nor as blind obedience, but as conscious participation in a community. Nevertheless, the film rejects any simple utopia.

Formally, »Venus Matinee« connects to those visions of the future that the cinema of the late sixties created. The white, almost sacred interiors quote Stanley Kubrick's »2001: A Space Odyssey,« while the sleek surfaces, artificial materials, and choreographed bodies evoke Chris Cunningham's iconic music video »All Is Full of Love« (1999). Yet where Cunningham stages the fusion of human and machine as being as fascinating as it is unsettling, »Venus Matinee« develops a different vision: here, technology serves neither surveillance nor optimization, nor even military power. It becomes a medium of care.

The visual world oscillates between a clinic and a cathedral. Spacesuits evoke liturgical vestments, medical apparatuses resemble altars. Kisses, drum rituals, pregnancies, and technical procedures combine into a choreography of attention. The space station appears not as a machine, but as an organism—as a place where science and spirituality no longer form opposites.

The film's depiction of women also deliberately moves away from familiar narratives. Femininity appears neither as a biological destiny nor as a romantic ideal, but as a creative, collective force. The community is characterized by reciprocity; desire, birth, and care become forms of shared action.

Thus, the film contradicts a vision of the future that understands outer space primarily as a setting for colonialism and expansion. Its space station is not an outpost of conquest, but a place of care. Here, the future does not begin with the settlement of new worlds, but with birth. The engine of the future is not expansion, but natality—that principle described by Hannah Arendt according to which every birth brings the possibility of a new beginning into the world. Peace thus appears as the art of creating conditions under which new life, new relationships, and new possibilities can continually emerge.

This work is part of VENUSWALD, a Lovelab exhibition that explores visions of peace.