Lucy van Kuhl - Cleverly Wrapped
Villa Meixner, Brühl, Germany
25.2 €
We live in an age where packaging often seems more important than content: a plain chocolate bar becomes an exclusive taste event through advertising, the caretaker gets the fancy title of facility manager instead of a pay rise, and love no longer arrives via Cupid's random arrow - it comes tailored and algorithm-driven, through Tinder and Parship.
German tourist Heinz Günter heads to France, puts on a striped shirt and a beret, and then wonders why - baguette under each arm and all - nobody takes him for a Jean Pierre. Packaging, it turns out, isn't everything.
In her fifth programme, Lucy van Kuhl wraps her own observations with equal skill: absurd reflections are draped in gentle piano melodies, tiny marginal details are examined through a large poetic magnifying glass, and the gloom of a care home is suddenly transformed - wrapped in a coat of imagination - into a rousing party for the over-80s.
Delicate melancholy collides with raucous nonsense, classical piano with boogie woogie. If you think those things can't go together, think again: Lucy's overflowing imagination is the bright ribbon that ties it all together with apparent ease. Very cleverly wrapped.











