Historical research plays an important role in Sophie Nys' art. She establishes current connections to places or historical events and thus builds a bridge between the past, art, and the present in her works. In doing so, she works with a variety of media and always with a dose of humor and lightness.

For Die Hütte she visited the Heidegger family’s famous summer house in the Black Forest over a longer period of time. Again and again she tried to approach the building, which is not open to the public. It was here that Martin Heidegger wrote his early major work Being and Time. Today, the hut is located on the tourist-marketed “Martin Heidegger Panorama Circular Trail,” an homage much like a late ironic revenge exacted by society on the famous philosopher, who investigated “there being” [Dasein] and existence and yet joined the NSDAP in 1933. Sophie Nys also takes up this contradiction. The voice-over in her film is formed by quotes from Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters (1985). Bernhard says of Heidegger that in his “deceptive blockhouse” he is the “slipper and sleeping cap philosopher of the Germans.” Pre-Alpine kitsch, ostensible coziness, the ambivalence of the postwar generation, and above all Heidegger the person – Bernhard settles accounts with everything. The mixture of anti-hierarchical imagery and eloquent attack engages the viewer. Sophie Nys combines and deciphers and clarifies without lecturing.

Brigitte Huck, 2019 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)