Kasseler Dokumentarfilm- und Videofest

Snail Trail – Philipp Artus

The work consists of a 2-minute laser animation loop in which a snail invents the wheel and goes through a cultural evolution to finally get back to its origin.

The animation is projected at an angle of 360° onto a column, so that the audience has to walk around it to follow the course of the snail. The projection surface is of a phosphorescent material, which creates an afterglowing trail that fades out slowly.

The basic idea of the work is inspired by a research into prehistory from the perspective of (post-)modern experience, an intersection which made me aware of the similarities between processes of exponential acceleration at different levels.

Thus, the evolution of life proceeds at an extremely slow pace for more than 3 billion years, until it suddenly seems to “explode” in the Cambrian period. The tools of human beings progress relatively little during the Stone Age until it reaches a point of a rapid cultural development during the Holocene. Nowadays, the acceleration of the cultural evolution is even exponentiated through the Internet. From this perspective, the exponential spiral on a snail shell may almost appear like a miraculous wink of nature.

Another theme that is explored here is the influence that a specific space has on the manner of being. In the animation, each environment forces the snail to invent a new locomotion. This principle can be seen in Darwin’s evolution theory, where species adapt to their surroundings, but it can also be experienced in daily life, where each environment influences our communication and behaviour.

The phosphorescent light trails offer a unique perspective on locomotion: through them, the audience can simultaneously see what happens, what has happened and what will happen. This reflection on time is elaborated further through the endlessly cycling structure of the work as well as through the recurring pulse of sound and light, which refers to periodic natural phenomena like the tides or the seasons.

Avatare – Tilmann Aechtner

They remind us of worms, of helpless creatures. On a low platform, three of these creatures try to free themselves with all their might from the cords that supply them with energy and impulses. A squeaking noise echoes through the room, which obviously comes from the servomotors of the hinges, but feels like a desperate cry for help to the observer. Tilmann Aechtner‘s avatars, small robot objects, contort themselves, sometimes aggressively, sometimes seemingly exhausted in a sequence of random motions on a knee-high white platform, where they are exposed to the observer. The individual parts – the limbs of the avatars – act autonomously and follow their own logic. The combination of these autonomous parts create a unique choreography, which is unrepeatable. It therefore may well happen that the objects fall off the platform and get entangled in their cords. In this case, the accident creates aliveness, which is manifested in their flaws.

Simple units, raw wood, a pencil mark here and there, which show the construction process: the robots appear rough and are difficult to behold. Tilmann Aechtner does not attempt to hide the technical aspect of the avatars, but deliberately leaves certain traces and thereby takes away the illusion of living organisms. But when the viewer turns his/her back on the platform, the squeaking of the motors will again catch his/her emotions. 

The interaction of the individual parts can be seen as a metaphor for society, where the action of one individual affects the whole system and causes constant mobility. In their never ending battle against technology from which they originate, the avatars contort themselves on the platform and will only be able to rest when someone pulls the plug at the end of the day.

Our Body is a Weapon – Clarisse Hahn

Political conflicts are conducted in a variety of ways. If words and voices are not heard, physical means will be called upon instead of verbal measures.

How the body is used as an instrument of resistance against current situations is the topic of Clarisse Hahn’s three-channel video installation. Three scenarios are shown on three monitors: Fighting men and women of the PKK, who are preparing for a fight in the borderland between Turkey and Iraq; former political prisoners, who went into a hunger strike in a Turkish prison; and indigenous farmers in Mexico, who made their situation known but received no answer – until they took to the streets: naked to the rhythm of drums.

The protests of the group of disowned farmers “Los Desnudos” were settled with an agreement – a compensation for disowned land was, albeit hardly sufficient, provided by the Mexican state. The women who were on hunger strike in the year 2000 are still suffering from the repercussions today and partly cannot speak for themselves, as “Prisons” shows in an impressive way. “Gerilla” uses material, which was provided from the Kurdish rebels themselves. In the first part, the fighters are shown engaged in “Gerilla”, a kind of game of seek and catch while preparing weapons, changing positions, dancing – violent fights follow. The second part is dedicated to Kurdish refugees from Iraq living in France.

In all three scenarios the special focus lies on the female protesting, resisting, fighting body – by dancing naked in public or in hunger hidden from the view of others in prison, training fight manoeuvres in a semi-public sphere, or presented as a portrait on a poster. This perspective also shows the implicit and invisible counter part of the filming woman – Clarisse Hahn is in the midst of these situations with a camera on her body but at the same time she manages to present with a pleasant distance.

Tolpa – Francis Hunger

In his installation TOLPA, Francis Hunger edits and comments on different scenes from films by Dziga Vertov, a historical Soviet film director and contemporary of Sergei Eisenstein. “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929) belongs to his most famous works. For his installation, Hunger also uses original material from two other, less known films entitled “Enthusiasm” (1930) and “Three Songs About Lenin” (1934). From these three films Hunger only edits scenes that depict masses of people, re-organized through categories: city, everyday life, workers, demonstration, army, grief.

The commentary is only present, like in silent films, as inserted text. The texts describe a dialogue of two fictitious characters about different conceptual approaches to write a stage play about Vertov. The two invisible protagonists also talk about the mass scenes, yet these only form the starting point for a conversation about the fate of the Russian avant-garde in the early 20th century, as well as the theories circulating at the time, which were located between science, utopia and art, such as those of the nowadays nearly forgotten biocosmists. By confronting the artistic and cultural movements of that time, whose repertoire and utopia was not limited to economical questions, it can be seen just how attractive the promise of communism initially must have been for people from diverse milieus.

For instance, the biocosmists aimed at resurrecting the dead in order to bestow them with the justness of Socialism. Their line of thought saw the human being as a body which can be manipulated at will, if one has the necessary, advanced technology to do so. In contrast to the idea of the resurrection of the immortal soul in Christianity, the biocosmists wanted to govern bodies in a museal sense. Instead of the grace of God, the state would function as a curator. By programmatically conquering death, time was controlled and became eternity – similar to the way the bourgeois museum, rejected by the avant-garde, creates permanence. However, resurrecting all ancestors would naturally cause a problem in terms of space: in turn, this problem became the pragmatic starting point for the Soviet space programme and the ideas of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Soviet rocketry pioneer. They were formed by the basic necessity of having to colonise new planets, where the resurrected could be settled.

In light of these discourses, Hunger addresses the question why and how the avant-garde, which once enthusiastically advocated the Russian revolution, was side-lined by Stalin. The art of the avant-garde as an instrument for state propaganda proved to be too hard to understand – unlike Socialist Realism that was declared in 1934 – and thus any kind of artistic experiment became resented.

A Tale of Two Islands – Steffen Köhn, Paola Calvo

On March 31st, 2011, the small island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean became the 101st département of France, and therefore officially a part of Europe. Since that day the EU has had a new external border, running between Mayotte and Anjouan, the neighboring island, which belongs to the Union of the Comoros Islands. Both islands were long part of the French colonial empire. During the African liberation period in the 1970s, when many former colonies were fighting their way to independence, a referendum was held on the two islands. Anjouan voted for independence. Mayotte decided to stay with the motherland. Mayotte is Europe under construction. The process of integrating the former colony into the French state is still in full swing. On Anjouan, the remainders of colonialism have already long been covered up by the wildness of nature. The post-colonial power imbalances, however, can still be sensed everywhere. 

The inhabitants of both islands share a linguistic and cultural identity and are intertwined with each other in complex relations of affinity. In the meantime, the border has become carefully guarded and the inhabitants of Anjouan need a visa to stay on Mayotte. Many Anjouanais therefore try to reach the neighboring island secretly, in nightly crossings on small motorboats called kwassas. The two-channel video installation A Tale of Two Islands by Steffen Köhn and Paola Calvo surveys the realities of life on the two islands in carefully composed tableaux on two opposing screens. Various encounters unfold in long documentary shots in the ports of the capitals on both islands.  

Nebahats Schwestern – Emanuel Mathias

With his video installation NEBAHATS SCHWESTERN (Nebahat’s Sisters), Emanuel Mathias goes in search of a fictive, female film figure in real life. In so doing, he explores the preliminary image, the copy, and after-image of such a “character” in a filmic and metaphoric sense, and questions the order of these images, which is generally considered fixed, by way of montage and other methods. His complex installation, thematically and formally convincing, consists of a three-channel video projection, filmed interview sequences, and a photograph, and oscillates between a remake and a real time movie, between a live “tableau vivant” and a living image, between reportage and role play, and touches on gender and ethnic conflicts. 

On the one hand, NEBAHATS SCHWESTERN is based on authentic reports and film scenes acted out by three Turkish women taxi drivers, while at the same time including selected sequences from the 1960 film “Şoför Nebahat” and an interview with the main actress. “Şoför Nebahat” was filmed several times or rather in several instalments, and these television films from the 1960s and 1970s still enjoy great popularity in Turkey today. They tell the story of a young female taxi driver in the process of emancipating herself; despite working in a profession that is superficially masculine – as is her habitus – she manages to preserves her underlying femininity and masters her life as a woman. Nebahat is thus an actual pre-existing image that is still very present in the media, and one that hardly anyone in Turkey can see past. 

For Emanuel Mathias, dealing with a motif specific to a country or a location subject might well have been the natural result of his 2010 DAAD fellowship in Istanbul. Yet with NEBAHATS SCHWESTERN he also continues the visual investigations of gestures and their meanings, both as handed down by tradition and as they shift during cultural history, and the construction of visual narratives that already interested him in his cautiously staged photography. Mathias’ first film work is also formally striking: but now beyond the internal structures of individual images, this work impresses with its professional editing, which here in particular entails the precisely coordinated linkage of various image sequences and temporal layers. In so doing, the attentive viewer can easily grasp the audiovisual, narrative film strands, and the interchange between diverse Nebahats never becomes a confusing comedy of errors. On the contrary, parallels and interferences among these Nebahat images are visualized in a very impressive fashion. It is thus possible for Mathias to spread out an ambivalent role-play and image of women in which he addresses an almost historical model by way of its current after images. For the most interesting is the image of Nebahat in those not only filmic gaps that are filled by NEBAHATS SCHWESTERN”, so to speak in terms of reception. This way of “completing an image” or “becoming a real image” is more fascinating than a film hero who steps directly out of the screen and into the audience, and yet remains on the projection surface. When one of the taxi drivers questioned by Emanuel Mathias and his translator says that she (who has the same name as the film figure) could play Nebahat by integrating the screenplay into her life, for a moment not only are preliminary image and after image or fiction and reality exchanged, but reality seems to be possible as a film. More still, the artist here reflects upon the effect that an artificial-artistic image can have on the life of spectators and art beholders. 

la la la – Kristin Meyer

A young woman is sleeping in a high sleeper bed, which is standing in the middle of a seemingly enclosed room, cushioned with square modules. Contradictory associations arise: Is the protagonist locked in a padded cell or was she salvaged in an imaginary panic room? When she awakes, she starts a daily routine, which is filled with surreal and symbolical elements. A golden egg, which is ticking in a bird cage, comes into view. The egg, traditionally a symbol of fertility and the awakening of life, seems like a surreal and ritual object due to its positioning in the cage. Her first deed is to go to the toilet. For the first time, the viewer looks into the face of the young woman. The right side of her face seems deformed; her eye is covered with scared tissue. A flute lies in front of the toilet, which the woman picks up while she is still sitting and begins to play the song “Reality” (Dreams are my reality).

The protagonist walks through the room and is confronted with the complexity of her own self, with isolation and abandonment, schizophrenia and fear, loving devotion and a daily routine. She eventually returns to bed and the only fixed points in the eternal recurrence of the loop are the moments of falling asleep and waking up. The sleeping period is just as long as her active times. Every step creates an unpleasant, cracking sound. The artist Kristin Meyer

developed the set and props using Scotch tape and paper. The original sound is unedited and hints at the creative process of making the video. LA LA LA, the title of the work, refers to childlike speech, which describes our world in a figurative and naive way. Rational criteria and cataloging can therefore notbe applied. Every recognition of a supposedly familiar routine will be demolished by disturbing and confusing moments. Every reason-based explanation is lost between fear and security, between magical fairytale and daily routine. Where does reality end? Where does imagination begin? Or in the words of the surrealist Salvador Dalí: “One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.” In the tradition of surrealist artists and psychoanalysts such as Carl Gustav Jung, Kristin Meyer creates a tale between dream and reality, which examines the relationship of the various levels of reality.

Die Wand – Hein-Godehart Petschulat

“Hartmut der Handwerker” (Hartmut the handyman) is a jaunty film, which shows how to build a partition wall in the form of docutainment. The movable wall is erected in a gallery, the commission is given via cell phone. Assisted by a voiceover, Hartmut carefully explains each step to the viewer just like the films in hardware stores or commercial television. The wall is built step by step, witnessed by the viewer in fast motion, while one also learns how to treat an assistant, how to spice up a soup, which is cooked workmanlike, with some jokes and how music (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Spin Doctors) speeds up the work flow and puts you in a good mood. “That was exhausting, but we’ve made it!” and with these words Hartmut goes off into a well deserved work-free evening. 

As part of the media installation by Hein-Godehart Petschulat, the wall is displayed in the venue and at the same time subject to the second film. This time, the film draws a reference to the typical reports broadcasted by cultural channels such as 3sat or arte and visits the young (fictitious) artist Michael Karsten. The new media artist became internationally known when he displayed old blue screens of the Paramount Studios. “The Hidden Everything” aimed to show projection screens, which represent the dreams provided by Hollywood’s dream factory. His thesis already sparked off a first scandal because he hired a private investigator to keep his teachers under surveillance. The findings were presented in six boxes and the teachers were free to choose whether the respective box would be open or locked. Though he did not graduate, one of the boxes was bought by the world famous collector Saatchi. Lately, Michael Karsten is in the middle of an artistic crisis, which he is trying to escape, but his thoughts go round in circles. It feels like a wall in his head and the artist hopes that by building an actual wall, he will be able to overcome his crisis. The film team follows the creation of the artwork – not the erection of the wall. In the end, Karsten is happy: “Now there is an actual wall in the venue and no longer in my head. The wall is now here and I gained a distance – to the wall.” 

Therefore, the wall that is displayed in the venue represents the link for an – ironic – debate about art and craft, commission and artwork, the thoughts of an artist and the fictional aspects of art and the emperor’s new clothes… – and how the media transports all of this.  

Statues Also Die – Sascha Pohle

In front of a black backdrop, a greyish rectangular object comes slowly closer until its outline succeeds the picture frame. Another object hovers in from the left, moves into the center of the image and towards the back, and then disappears. Their silent movements recall spaceships in the vast darkness of the universe. More similar objects are presented in short still sequences from the back and from the front, crossing the screen or turning slowly in front of the camera. Faces and bodies begin to appear in the abstract forms. 

In his silent 16mm film in five chapters, Sascha Pohle portraits the empty packaging material of electronic devises, focusing on the sculptural qualities of the surface structures, three dimensional folds, and individual cut-out shapes. Already in 1959, the artist Gustav Metzger presented the cardboard packaging of a television set found on the street as ready-made sculptures. But Pohle’s reference goes further. The title quotes the homonymous film “Les statues meurent aussi” by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. In their 1953 blackand- white film, Marker and Resnais address a history of cultural theft and exploitation on the example of African sculptures. Here, the spiritual fetish objects become commodified and banalized when taken out of their cultural or ritual context and presented in the ethnographical collections of European museums, further reduced in meaning through endless replicas to feed the Western market with “African” arts and crafts. 

Sascha Pohle adapts the steady camera and dramatic lighting of the original, but reverses the shift in meaning by presenting the industrial garbage of today’s commodity fetishes as if they were archeological finds or ethnographical artifacts in an imaginary museum. The disposable objects become reanimated, revaluated, and fetishized; their concave and convex forms mimick African masks, animal totems or Pre-Columbian statues. Interested in questions of authenticity and exoticism, original and copy, Pohle draws from various film and art historical references. STATUES ALSO DIE explores the notion of fetishism in the light of different cultural and aesthetical contexts. What remains of an object, when deprived of its content? What does a shape relate to? And how do we relate to a shape, a form, an object – or its empty shell? 

A Ripe Volcano – Taiki Sakpisit

Bangkok in May 1992. Thousands of people gather in the streets of the city heading towards the administration buildings of the new government in power. There they demand the election promise, which has not been held, since instead of a civilian head of state General Suchinda was declared prime minister. Suchinda has the peaceful demonstration stopped by military force. In the following three days the conflict develops into a street fight. Some of the protestors manage to flee into the Rattanakosin Hotel. 

The long halls of the hotel lay deserted. Slowly the camera scans the rooms and objects. There are cracking and creaking noises, sirens howl, flashy light falls through a window. It remains unclear what has happened and it is increasingly unclear where we are. The steps become careful because it seems like danger is close by. The experience of time changes between what has happened and what lies shortly ahead, and therefore unifies memory and expectation to a deep feeling of suspense and uncertainty. 

In A RIPE VOLCANO Taiki Sakpisit shows the atmosphere of a nation in vivid pictures, where unsettled presentment accompanies post-traumatic numbness. Scenes of rituals in schools, the military and sports events indicate a moment in which the atmosphere will switch and the suspense discharges into a threatening eruption. Places and people bare witness to a traumatic past, which has burned itself into the collective emotional memory and at the same time refers to an unsure future. The fight was fought by others but not least the viewers become part of it – the suspense does not dissolve. At every moment the wave could roll over the land but currently the spilling is calm and steady.  

I can. You can. – Marko Schiefelbein

A young woman is sitting on a couch, focusing her counterpart – or the camera – and begins to speak. Just like in a motivational exercise, she presents her strengths and herself. “I know who I am. What I want. Where I stand. I know what I can do. I think I know myself.” Self-confident and convincingly, she develops her monolog of self-definition, which changes along the way into a credo of happiness and success. In the end, she affirms the viewer: “I can. You can.” Almost as if she wants to fascinate, motivate and encourage herself, she changes perspectives, insists on her statements and claims to be on “an exhilarating journey”. She gets carried away in her speech, one statement follows the next, she loses touch with reality, defines the recipe of success – and falls as she starts to contradict herself. “To become the best, I must be driven. Turn my fears into strength. And never give up. I can sit here and get the shit shaken out of me or I can fight my way back into the light.” She becomes everything and nothing, is knowledge and ignorance, war and peace and realizes in the end: “I am the first and the last. Again and again.” 

Whom is she talking to? What is the basis for this conversation? What is the subject? 

Despite her commitment and powerful speech, one soon notices that all her convictions are nothing but empty promises and ideological phrases. The monolog turns out to be a collage of fragmented slogans that drive the protagonist – a victim, who simply wants to survive by motivating herself. 

antimap – Oli Sorenson

Oli Sorenson’s installation ANTIMAP is part of an ongoing project, which will be realized as a site-specific, artistic intervention in Kassel. Avoiding authorship in the classical sense, the Montreal-based American artist uses various disciplines in his artistic practice: performance, painting, video installation and digital art. Oli Sorenson does not consider himself only an artist but also works as an author and curator. 

ANTIMAP refers to the iconic, exactly 8.7 cm wide colored stripes of concept artist Daniel Buren, which have distinguished his work since the late 1960s. Buren did not only apply the stripes to classical media such as painting on canvas and textiles, but also designed sculptures and public as well as private institutional architecture. In ANTIMAP , black and white stripes are projected not onto a two dimensional surface but onto various wall-mounted three-dimensional forms. The projection surface no longer serves as an image carrier but becomes a formative element: projected onto the three-dimensional objects the stripes adapt their shapes. Oli Sorenson not only adopts and reinterprets Buren’s stripes, but reverses the logic of the classical mapping technique and cinematographic depiction. While the projected image remains unchanged, the image carrier changes the perceived image through its “being object” and thus creating a sculptural quality with a high visual stimulus for the observer and indicating references to Op art. In a modernistic sense, Sorenson makes “art about art” and makes the media and traditions of artistic production his topic in a self-reflexive way: the limits of the image carrier become the subject of art in the modern understanding of Clement Greenberg. Sorenson translates Buren’s artistic statement into a contemporary form on a technical level, using digital techniques. At the same time, this technical setting creates a synthesis of the iconic stripes between appropriation, media art and sculptural form. 

A Kind of Sad Story – Dennis Stein-Schomburg

It really is a kind of sad story: on a little farm, a hen does not seem to want to lay any eggs. The farmer gives the hen some time, without success. Consequently, the hen ends up in a pot. After all, a farm is not an animal shelter. The farmer regrets his decision bitterly already shortly after, when he makes an astonishing find leading to the instant rehabilitation of the hen. It is a true story, which Dennis Stein-Schomburg retells in his work A KIND OF SAD STORY. Inspired by pop-up books for children, which reveal three-dimensional forms when opened, the young animation artist tells his farm story in an unconventional way. 

In a darkened room a book lies on a pedestal that contains the story in a compressed form. When the visitor flips through the pages, the story is told page by page in English and short animations are projected onto the cut outs, which open up when a page is turned. The events are animated physically and by the moving image. Each turn of a page holds another surprise. The animated images fit the opened cut outs accurately, the smallest displacement would take away the illusion. Therefore, the book is fixed to the pedestal. 

Dennis Stein-Schomburg (winner of the Golden Herkules in 2011 for his film “Andersartig”) worked with the Portuguese artist Maria Carvalho on the book for several weeks. The animation clips were developed at the same time, using digital cut out. Only in the end, when both elements were brought together in the process of projection mapping, the artists found out whether the two elements worked together. The story works on various medial levels – the linguistic, three-dimensional and animated – especially due to the arrangement of the film, which is split into short chapters. The observer chooses the tempo and order in which the pages are turned and can therefore interact with the story and the film. 

To produce and present films beyond the definite screen and timeline is an important and possibly lucrative task for the coming generation of filmmakers. And who knows, maybe in a couple of years, parents will have a “pocket projector” when reading a bed time story to their children that intensifies the visual experience and can be adjusted to various pop-up books. 

Das Geld und die Griechen – Florian Thalhofer

Greece is in a crisis. And with the Greek all of Europe is in a crisis, because when Greece crashes financially, Portugal, Spain and Italy are at risk of bankruptcy as well. The Euro is endangered, the idea of a united Europe is endangered, a disaster of apocalyptical magnitude looms. Or does it? How do people in Greece look at it? How do they experience the crisis? How did it happen and how do people deal with it? What do the Greek think of the Germans and vice versa? What can we learn? Can the crisis even be a chance? 

The media artist and filmmaker Florian Thalhofer and his Greek partner Elissavet Aggou traveled across Greece in the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012. They conducted numerous interviews and collected material for a Korsakow-Project. The interviews give a fascinating insight into the mood of the Greek and the European. From politicians to taxi drivers, from the hotelier to the vegetable farmer – they all reflect bluntly and unfiltered on the causes and impact of the financial crisis. 

The material of the documentary film project was used in various ways. The artists developed a Korsakow-Film (a non-linear, rule-based web film), a talk show with the possibility for the audience to participate and an interactive multi-channel video installation with a main screen and four satellites with complementary video material. 

The different formats of the project, which can be experienced on- and offline, focus on new ways of audience participation. Thereby, the artist approaches a complex, topical subject like the financial crisis and creates an overall image that is put together form different perspectives. 

Atemlos – Pim Zwier

What remains from life? And what is worth keeping for the future? The work ATEMLOS (Breathless) by the Dutch artist Pim Zwier shows how animals of the zoological collection of the Martin-Luther-University in Halle are prepared and conserved as scientific models and objects for exhibitions in striking images. 

The video work is shown as a three piece composition. While the fur of a lifeless sheep is combed and carefully freed from tangles, a group of live sheep and lambs are shown which are standing around in a field. In the third part of the projection, a fur is spread over a sterile metal surface and treated with fluids. Over 2.5 million scientific preparations of the collection of the Martin- Luther-University in Halle-Wittenberg show how living creatures used to look like and what they look like now. In wooden drawers lie collections of insects, rodents and small animals. Countless bugs, grasshoppers and butterflies; one insect next to another, precisely and carefully pierced; a fragile beauty is revealed. A leg of a bug is carefully straightened with a pair of tweezers and is placed in a lifelike position next to the body of the animal. The attentiveness, with which the dead animal is met, seems almost ironic in comparison to the perception of animals in everyday life. In precise film sequences Pim Zwier follows the work of the preparators, who patiently and with a seemingly gentle calmness sew together furs, dust off older exponents and insert glass eyes. Sparkling eyes of raptors glance toward us; the round eyes of a deer and a fox. The motionless preparations irritate us because they look convincingly alive. But silence lies above all; only the sounds of people working and a quiet buzz are noticeable. The zoological collection conserves life and apparently freezes it, similar to a time capsule. 

ATEMLOS tells the tale of the variety of life; at the same time Pim Zwier’s work makes apparent the absurdity of human actions. The extinct and rare, the threatened and the common species are gently conserved for the next generation because who knows how much longer they will exist. Next to the almost completed preparation of a sheep we see the live sheep forced together closely in the second part of the projection. A tragic synchronism: the prepared animal seems like a messenger of his species, a future relic. The finiteness of nature, at the same time reason and danger for the collection, is not at the very least a result of human intervention. 

Grenzen – Simona Koch

Living things leave behind traces through their mere existence – the paths they embark on, the actions they perform – and in doing so they influence the lives of other organisms. They have a tendency to mark their territory or, like man, to draw borders. National borders describe the limits of dominions. A border always also means both inclusion and exclusion, and has an impact on political, social, cultural and economical factors.

Generally, the shifting of borders occurs during wars and involves bloodshed, human and ecological tragedies. For exiles and refugees, it means the loss of their native country, of their roots and places dear to them. For nature, it can entail the clearing of entire swathes of land, as for the Spanish Armada in the 16th century, when half the country was cleared to build a flotilla with which the Spaniards sought to conquer England. Legend has it that in the years before this mass clearance, squirrels could travel from the Pyrenees to Andalusia jumping from one tree to the next and without ever touching the ground. Yet border conflicts also bring about the loss of cultural roots – even many generations later, the traces of a border shifting are still palpable.

These traces are visualized in a series of video animations. First, I used historical maps to research the shifting of borders. Then, in the animation, I drew the borders in pencil on a blank sheet of paper, repeatedly erased them and replaced them chronologically by the subsequent borderlines up until the present day. Seen from above in fast motion, mankind appears like a swarm of bark beetles, digging itself through earth. Finally, also today’s borders get erased. What remains is the vague shape of the respective world region as portrayed by a myriad of blurred lines.

Triangular Stories – Henrike Naumann

Paul, Friedrich and Lou; Werther, Albert and Lotte; Jim, Jules et Catherine: The motif of the triangular relationship occurs frequently in social life, literature and film and triggers the imagination of story tellers, directors, novelists, reporters and biographers. One trio and its story lies in the focus of the public prosecutor’s and the German language media’s attention: Uwe, Uwe and Beate. These three right-wing radicals, who lived in the underground of Zwickau for ten years and are accused of the murder of ten persons living and working in Germany, make out the center of Henrike Naumann’s installation. Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt are dead; a law suit against Beate Zschäpe is in preparation. The current extent of evidence, though, suggests that there will be more blank spaces than a coherent reconstruction of this terroristic group, which came together as the “National Socialist Underground”, given the silence of the accused. Next to the crimes themselves, the absence or more accurately the destruction of documents – through the perpetrators or the investigation authorities – moved into the focus of public interest. 

This is where TRIANGULAR STORIES sets in: What if Beate, Uwe and Uwe from Jena (later known as the “Zwickau Terror Group”) had not only filmed each other but what if these home videos were available for us? And what were we, the generation post-Golf, actually doing at that time?  

The results of this scenario are two films: one in located in Jena, another on Ibiza. Neither are carefree. The material, which was re-enacted by actors under these changed conditions and filmed in part, follows two different narrations with different stories and two locations – only the cast remains the same. Two trios, two settings: One film begins with the oppressive supply of the camera. As of this moment, as Henrike Naumann suggests, the camera accompanies the scenes of the youths in Jena of the 1990s. In a youth’s bedroom, on the couch under the posters of pop stars and a flag of the German Reich linger Uwe, Uwe and Beate. She reads aloud from the sex educational page of the youth magazine “Bravo”: Can one become pregnant if one sits in the same bathtub, which your brother masturbated in earlier? Dr. Sommer’s answer is not revealed to the viewer. Instead the camera documents “Sieg Heil”-yells, destructions in public buildings and rooms, attacks on persons and the ongoing interaction of the three youths.