She also founded the performance group La Musica, initiated a theater festival and is a founding member of the Modern Dance Company at the Cairo Opera House. After completing her studies of French and comparative literature, she worked as an assistant at the Academy of Arts in Cairo. NORA AMIN is a woman of letters as well as a dancer and director. To be an astronaut and astronomer at the same time.
The question is always: How can I put that luxury to use? The broader question is how to best engage with systems? I would like to be able to look at things up close and from afar, from the personal and micropolitics to the universal language of art (if such a thing exists). It also made it easier for me to move between systems, therefore I am afforded with the chance to choose what, when and how I contribute. It is formulated into installations, videos, audio, gigs, happenings, events, or anything.Īs an artist, I always consider how I can function within my surrounding realities. The closest I may come is to say that my practice is trans-disciplinary and exists on the intersection of sound/music, DIY engineering, research, biohacking, activism and more. It depends on the context how I engage with those systems, from preserving to initiating, intervening, supporting, negotiating, hacking, questioning, etc. Most, if not all, of my practice derive from rhythms and systems. I am fascinated by the fact that even small interventions can change something to form new sustainable support systems. Sandra Ann Lauer was born in the German town of Saarbrücken, close to the French border.For me, all things are connected: from the atomic level to larger social structures. Her father, Robert Lauer, who owned a wine store in Saarbrücken, is French and her mother, Karin ( née Eltern), who worked in a shoe store, is German. She also had an older brother, Gaston, a paraplegic who died in 1995. Sandra showed an early interest in music and dancing, starting to learn classical ballet at the age of 5, which she would continue for ten years, and receiving guitar lessons when she was 10 years old. In 1975, at the age of thirteen, Sandra went with her mother to see Young Star Festival, a Saarbrücken talent competition. She was only a member of the audience, but when all participants had finished performing and the jury was discussing the results, Sandra walked onto the stage, persuaded the DJ to put on the German version of a song made famous by Olivia Newton-John and started singing.
The impromptu performance gained considerable recognition and led to the release of her first single, which was a children's song about a pet dog, 'Andy mein Freund'. The single, however, performed poorly on charts at that time dominated by disco mania. Sandra won international success in 1985 with a song '(I'll Never Be) Maria Magdalena', which topped the charts in 21 countries worldwide and reached top 10 in further five. Her first album, The Long Play (1985), reached number 12 in her home country of Germany and was a top 10 success in Scandinavia. The follow-up single, 'In the Heat of the Night', continued her international success, reaching number two in Germany and top 10 positions in many European countries. The song also earned Sandra second place at the Tokyo Music Festival in 1986. 'Little Girl' became the third single from the album in 1986, with the music video filmed in Venice, but met with moderate success. Shortly after the release of The Long Play, Sandra moved to London for six months, where she worked with singing instructor Helena Shelen and took drumming lessons to practice her timing. She also joined a language school, where she worked on her English skills, while she spent weekends in Munich recording new songs. Sandra and Michael married in January 1988 and relocated from Munich to the Spanish island Ibiza to work on what would be Sandra's third studio album. Into a Secret Land moved from electro-pop to more sophisticated areas of pop, what was showcased by the first single, 'Heaven Can Wait', a top 20 European hit.