Jakob Gaumer
How to Händchenhalten
stop motion animation
2:30 min
2025
Under a radiant blue sky, daisies sway gently in the wind. Two Lego figures stumble awkwardly toward one another. Without serial numbers, warning labels, or manuals, they have developed a life of their own. Their clumsiness makes closeness difficult—yet somehow they find their way to each other. In his paintings and short films, the artist explores the childlike, naïve longing for a wholesome, manageable world. Everyday objects such as Lego figures, trains, or cigarette butts become projection surfaces for human emotions, oscillating between romanticization, idealization, artificiality, and exaggerated happiness. In times when artificial intelligence increasingly shapes our daily lives and interactions, these fragile worlds of play remind us of something essential: that even the most advanced systems cannot replace the subtle, imperfect, and tender gestures of human connection. The tension between technology’s promise of efficiency and the deep human need for vulnerability and intimacy becomes a mirror of our society—caught between the mechanized and the poetic, the predictable and the unpredictable, the artificial and the profoundly real.