3 Tage Frei presents: Erika’s Daughters

Residency project by Lina Determann & Jette Schwabe

Erika Mustermann is Germany’s official placeholder identity. Since 1987, she has been looking back at us from ID cards and forms: white, blonde, blue- or green-eyed, neutrally smiling. A state-constructed face that still drifts almost unchanged through the bureaucratic landscape today—standardizing, classifying, excluding.

With their residency project Erika’s Daughters, Lina Determann and Jette Schwabe take this figure as the starting point for a performative investigation. They enter into dialogue with Erika Mustermann—and, by extension, with societal notions of the female* average, representation, and identity. Who was declared the norm here? According to which criteria? And why does the Federal Printing Office still refuse to provide any information about the selection process?

So who is Erika Mustermann?

In the RESIDENCY, Erika Mustermann becomes negotiable: as woman*, as question, as presence. Through public castings in urban space, Erika is to be re-cast together with local actors* and transformed into a collective tool.

What happens when her model identity is carried by bodies she would otherwise overlook? What does her voice sound like if we give her one? What happens when suddenly everyone is called Erika Mustermann? And what does an individual look like who is meant to unite (everything) within themselves?

Behind Erika’s Daughters are Lina Determann and Jette Schwabe, an interdisciplinary duo of artists working at the intersection of performance, film, and installation. In their collaborative practice, they engage with feminist and socio-political questions, constructing worlds that exist between reality and fiction through the deliberate negotiation of documentary precision and performative estrangement.

Their projects often emerge in close exchange with local communities and experiment with collective forms of authorship. After completing their diploma studies in scenography and exhibition design at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, they consciously shift their focus to the independent scene—in search of open production formats, new alliances, and artistic spaces of possibility.