The artist and filmmaker Corinna Schnitt (1964, Duisburg) is active on the German and international art scene. After training as a wood-carver, she studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach and at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf. For many years now she has made use of film in her work. She created a series of short experimental films in which daily phenomena are pushed to the limit like an endless spiral, witness 'Raus aus seinen Kleidern'. Besides numerous video installations featured in museums and galleries, Schnitt shows her work in film festivals and on German television.

In a living room, a camera is slowly turning round, just about thirty centimetres above the carpet. There is no-one to be seen. A cat suddenly appears and moments later a second one enters the room. A dog drinks water from a fish bowl, a bird joins the assembled company, a rabbit hops in, a goose waggles its way among them, somewhere a pig is grubbing about, a goat, a lama, there is no end to it. Gradually the room is filling up with more and more animals which are sniffing at each other, startling each other or munching on a house plant together. In the intro to Living a Beautiful Life (2003), an earlier work by Corinna Schnitt, we saw all kinds of very young children sitting, lying, walking and playing naked together in an idyllic landscape. The religious or romantic association with a primeval world in which living creatures would once have co-existed, also emerges from Once Upon a Time.

In 'Lord of the Flies', William Golding describes a group of children being washed ashore on a desert island, where they design their own social structure as if it were a natural process. It is remarkable to witness how quickly the theoretical ideal formulated by the children becomes blemished. Their society degenerates into a very cruel, unjust and violent one. As introduction to Living a beautiful life, Schnitt shows a fragment from Der Katzenprinz, a Czech-East-German film made in 1978. Here, as in a vision, we see the reverse; cheerful, naked children living in a paradise where even wild animals are free from cruelty. The fragment is rather over the top, and, due also to the imagery, recognizable as an exponent of 1970s ideas on freedom and happiness. Which in turn confronts us with the fact that, by now, these ideas have become rather tainted and have been superseded by sense of reality. Although? Has anything taken their place?