Eva & Adele: The One-of-a-kind Life of A Futuristic Pair Of Hermaphrodite Twins
Eva & Adele, how to introduce this iconic couple without harming the power of their images, works, and performance? The narrative that this duo builds to surround their life and art, is of such meticulous precision that it requires no words, but a sole glance at their pictures, paintings, costumes, objects, or more simply, their physical appearance.
Eva & Adele: Life As A Permanent Performance
The official story tells that Eva and Adele met in a vehicle traveling in time, a “time-machine”. The vehicle landed in Berlin, in 1989, a crucial moment for Germany as the wall dividing the country was finally falling. According to them, they came from the “future”.
The duo decided to become artists, to perform a masterpiece that will last days and nights without interruption, or in their own words “with no beginning and no end”. To explain it in more simple terms, Eva & Adele turned their entire life into an artistic performance consisting of becoming forever two characters they themselves created. Two characters that completely hide who they really are.
Their creation consists of twins, always dressed in the same way, with quite pink outfits and abundant glittery make-up. Both have surprisingly bald heads, while the rest of their outfit is attributed to a feminine wardrobe. Here comes into play the central characteristic of Eva & Adele, they pertain to no gender because they are said to be hermaphrodite twins.
The performance of the artists is of no prevalent equivalence. Other artists have decided before to physically incarnate characters and in a lively manner, but it never crossed the borders of museums, always limited to artistic places, videos, paintings, or photography. Eva & Adele decided to carry on their artistic performance outside of museums, in their daily life, while grocery shopping, traveling, and simply existing. Every morning they take around three hours to get ready, carefully choosing their outfits and make-up based on a plan they established in advance. Their artistic statement might seem eccentric, but it follows precise rules the couple set thoroughly. Eva & Adele work with fashion designers for their clothes, keep a detailed schedule for what to wear each day, archive every picture of themselves, edit books retracing their journey, create exhibitions, doing at the same time the work of the performer artist, the manager, or the museum director, without any limits.
Their first set of videos exhibition, named Hellas, illustrates their artistic research in a series of 7 short scenes projected simultaneously, representing the story of their encounter and their progressively more intense fusion as hermaphrodite humans, twins, and artists.
Another example of their total dedication to the characters they built, with no wish to ever stop performing, is their Polaroid Diary from 1991 to 2005. Every morning, without exception, the couple took a picture of themselves before going out. The result is a series of 1500 self-portraits depicting Eva & Adele's incredible work as fashion designers, make-up artists, and breakers of gender barriers.
Eva & Adele: Life As Gender Breaking Artists
At the core of their project, Eva & Adele are engaged in a performance that questions society’s norms. Becoming a performance artist is already a bold life choice, with a commitment to always interact with the public directly, implicating emotional attachment as much as frontal criticisms. But the couple goes even further, by invoking the question of gender as their central thematic since their beginning in the 90s.
At the time of their real encounter, Eva was transexual and the two acknowledged the difficulties they will have to face to be accepted in this way within society. The artists never wanted to say what they were doing or who they were before their artistic transformation, but they stated that this choice of characters allowed them to turn their differences into something positive that they could promote as a political and artistic act. Instead of living in permanent threat and harassment, the couple decided to fully embrace and amplify their desire to be whoever they wanted as artists, hermaphrodites, transgender, lesbians.
Their art is about breaking the boundaries of gender, and in their own words, to show to other people that it is possible “to build its own identity”. Their dual appearance as both men and women, with bald heads and pink outfits, is a chosen representation of what they declare to be: not gendered but hermaphrodite humans, neither man nor woman. Moreover, the choice of vinyl fuchsia dresses in form of hearts, pink fur high-heels, rainbows make-up, or thousands of girly handbags, is a reappropriation of the normed pink color exclusively reserved to women, as they explain. For Eva & Adele, another justification for the choice of this color is of capital importance as they live in Berlin: during the Second World War, the Nazis designated to homosexuals a pink triangle they wore at all times to be identified as anomalies among the German society. Behind their curious appearances, Eva & Adele have carefully chosen every detail of their characters to support their strong political commitment and social fight.
Eva & Adele’s wedding was of political and artistic extreme importance. After having fought for years to legally change the sex of Eva to female, the couple’s union was celebrated as a same-sex wedding between women in a staged performance named Hochzeit Metropolis at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a museum in Berlin, in 1991 (20 years before they were legally able to get married).
By always turning this social issue positively and joyfully, by not using common expressions like LGBTQ+ but by creating their own language with terms such as “hermaphrodite”, they became icons of political commitment in the contemporary art scene worldly.
