I Wan’na Be Like You
Margit Lukács & Persijn Broersen
AKINCI, Amsterdam
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- 00:00
- Title
- I Wan’na Be Like You
- Gallery
- AKINCI, Amsterdam
- Year
- 2024
- Duration
- 12 min 44 s
- Format & Technical
HD video with sound, digital animation
- LOOP Edition
- Ed. 2024
- Presented in LOOP by
- AKINCI
- Margit Lukács & Persijn Broersen, 'I Wan'na Be Like You' at AKINCI 2024, photo by Peter Tijhuis
I Wan’na Be Like You is a video in which they explore the Western image of the ‘jungle’, often seen as supposedly unexplored land that served as a symbol of desire for colonial powers. Through a complex process of photogrammetry, 3D-moulding and modelling, motion capture and CGI, Lukács & Broersen created a virtual representation of the conquered wilderness as it is preserved throughout the most important botanical gardens of Europe. It serves as a backdrop for an avatar dancing to an adaptation of I Wan’na Be Like You from Disney’s Jungle Book (1967). The song is reinterpreted by musician David Lukács as a tribute to the New Orleans jazz tradition. As an indictment of the underlying racism of the original and as a proud rendition of the history of their ancestors, Jamal Bijnoe and Orlando Ceder (Black Harmony) have rearranged the melody into the song Na Mi.
Stills
Dutch artist duo Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács work across a wide range of media—most notably video, animation, and graphics—producing works that reflect on the ornamental qualities of contemporary society. Their practice is marked by an exploration of the sources of today’s visual culture. Through video pieces that incorporate filmed footage, digital animation, and images appropriated from the media, they demonstrate how reality, mass media, and fiction are deeply intertwined in contemporary society. Broersen and Lukács both studied at the Sandberg Institute and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Their projects, which include layered projections, digital animations, and spatial installations, have been shown at renowned institutions and events such as the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, MacKenzie Art Gallery (CA), Stedelijk Museum Breda (NL), Centraal Museum Utrecht (NL), HKW Berlin/ Louvre Paris for Rencontres Internationales, FOAM (NL), Centre Pompidou, Kröller Müller (NL), Biennale of Sydney, Rencontres Arles (FR), and Wuzhen Biennial (CN). They represent the Netherlands at the 2024 Gwangju Biennale, in South Korea.