“You just gotta find the right institution” (First Months of Freedom). Institutions can protect, mediate, demand, control, exclude. Fragmented classstories observe and question obvious and opaque power relations between individual and institution, the intertwining of class-experiences, work relations, gender constructions and affect. What is their relation during legal phone council for inmates, involuntary freedom on parole, work routine in the cooler, artistic work, the gaze onto the other. How to cope with our feelings in the system? (Jessica Manstetten)
Every day the legal advice service of the “Reflection Action Prison and Justice Association” receives phone calls from prisoners. Little by little, conversations escape from their primary function and outline individual stories and the relation between the operators and the inmates.… >>>
A woman and her first months of parole into the pandemic.… >>>
A cold storage worker's job follows him around.… >>>
The attempt at a personal and self-reflective form of artistic criticism, which observes art, its production and its form of presentation through the lens of class. The work explores issues around the intersections of negative affect and political agency, problematizing the notions of social advancement that the field of contemporary art simultaneously produces and presupposes. In an essay-esque approach, the multifarious meaning of distance in a subjective as well as social sense is reflected upon.… >>>
When Roland Barthes visited China in 1973, he jotted down some notes that would become part of his travels in China (Carnets du voyage en Chine), an underplot of desire in his imagination of the country. Barthes did not publish these writings during his lifetime, and his unsettling judgments about China are refracted in Peng Zuqiang's work as fragments of dialogues on class and looking, responding to the reflections on the same matters elicited alongside Barthes' sense of eroticism. The local tourist in the film travels through different spaces and gatherings, seemingly never looking at anyone, yet silently looking at someone, turning towards a certain collectivity in the know. A possible subversion of a homoerotic foreign gaze?… >>>