Sub Rosa

The Arco de la Victoria in the northwestern part of Madrid: Young people talk, laugh, smoke and skate, flirt, chat, and surf on their smartphones. They wear baseball caps, hoodies, T-shirts, sneakers, and socks by Adidas, Puma, and Nike. In his most recent video and sound installation Sub Rosa (2017–2019) Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques portrays adolescence as a phase not only of superficiality and narcissism but also of inner turmoil and loneliness. At the same time, he unmasks this image as a commercial tool used by the world’s biggest fashion empires to market their products. Sub Rosa is an installation distributed across a number of film tracks and combined with self-generative soundscapes. It won the C/O Berlin Talent Award in 2019. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at C/O Berlin with texts by this year’s prizewinning author, Mira Anneli Naß.