‘Garden of Just Enough’ is a story of isolated communities, secrecy and the loss of identity. In this work, we merge past, present and performance, to conceal and reveal fragments of who we are. We use archival material from our upbringing in the Children of God and our own photographic work, which we deconstruct and reconstruct through censorship, hiding and editing. This journey through bounded choice and manipulation gives insight, while showing that as an outside observer, the cult never gives you the full picture of what goes on inside.

In 1968, David Brandt Berg founded the Children of God. His blend of non-traditional Christian fanaticism and free love ideals quickly won over tens of thousands all around the world who left everything to live in communes and dedicate their lives to this newly found purpose. Throughout the years, Berg wrote more than 3000 ‘letters’ to his flock, firmly guiding their every thought and action. After his death in 1994, his partner Karen Zerby continued in his path, until, in the 2000s, the cult slowly disintegrated, leaving thousands of isolated missionaries to assimilate into a society from which they were completely alienated.

Our parents joined this cult as teenage dropouts in the seventies and gave up everything to live entirely for this cause. This is where we were born and raised, isolated from the outside world. When we left the cult we were also teenagers, and much like our parents, we were looking for meaning. But we found ourselves feeling alien in a completely foreign world with no guidance. This feeling of displacement and loss of identity is something we still carry with us today.

Children of the Future
Video, Analogue Archive Photos Treated With AI

By fusing our childhood photos with one another with AI, we created a happy replica where identities and timelines are merged and transformed. In this piece we pose a question that we often asked ourselves: ‘how we know who we truly are, when we do not have the freedom to exercise our own choices’.

Shangri-La
Video
26:10mins

In James Hilton’s novel ‘Lost Horizon’ from 1933, ‘Shangri-La’ is a place in which people live an enduringly happy life isolated from the outside world in an earthly paradise. They appear to live in perfect harmony and are almost immortal, only aging very slowly. The downside of this reality is that if the people were ever to leave the utopian valley of Shangri-La, they would age very quickly and die.

The original footage of ‘Shangri-La’ was recorded in a present-day community setting as a performative action. The bare and surrendering bodies represent the act of giving up one’s identity for a ‘greater good’, for a common ideology. Such realities can quickly lead to dogmatic, black-and-white thinking and can especially thrive in settings that are isolated - in bubbles that are very often shaped by censorship: Censorship from the outside world, censorship of information and, ultimately, a censorship of the self.

The soundtrack is built solely on treated and untreated sound samples from The Children of God’s music. It explores memory and the manipulative use of music to direct people’s emotional and psychological attention. In cults, music is often employed as a form of propaganda and mind control, rewiring the brain to focus a specific ideology or person, and contributing to further indoctrination and isolation from the outside world.