Program – 23: 2025-26
Short description
This program was a screening in three parts. It started in New York on October 16, 2025. The screening showed one video edit, about four hours long. It contained 27 video works or excerpts and live contributions. The "program details" below list each video and state duration, category, short description, authors, and title. While each video played, text on the screen gave basic information and context about it. The whole screening then travelled, with small adaptations, to Vienna in November 2025 and Berlin in January 2026. There was also an extra screening in Basel in March 2026.
| Format | Screening situation, video |
|---|---|
| Total duration | From October 2025 to March 2026 |
| Accessibility | Most of the moving image contributions as part of the screening include written text that must be read for the material to be accessed; all language-based contributions are subtitled in English. In case on-screen reading for longer durations causes you difficulties, you may use the printed Data sheet as an alternative tool for orientation. The lights will remain switched on throughout the screening |
| Content notice | The screening includes discussions of colonial violence, discrimination towards sex workers, military violence, police violence, political repression, racism, and suicide. These subjects are addressed analytically or documentarily. There are no explicit depictions of physical violence. |
| Date | Time | Venue | Duration | Accessibility |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Friday, March 13, 2026 | 14:00–18:00 | distro InfoSpace, Auf dem Wolf 11, 4052 Basel (as part of Make/Sense Assembly, Critical Media Lab, FHNW Basel) | not specified | distro is located on the first floor and can be accessed by elevator. |
| Thursday, January 15, 2026 | 16:00–20:00 | Stooj, Schillerstraße 6, 10625 Berlin | 15.–31.01.2026 | Stooj is on the groundfloor of a residential building. Two stairs are to climb downward. |
| Tuesday, November 18, 2025 | 18:00–22:00 | Pech, Große Neugasse 44/2, 1040 Vienna | 18.–23.11.2025 | Pech is located in a lower ground floor with three stairs to climg downward |
| Thursday, October 16, 2025 | 18:00–22:00 | The Emily Harvey Foundation, 537 Broadway, New York, NY 10012 | 16.–18.10.2025 | The Emily Harvey Foundation is on the first flor of a ware house building accessible by elevator. |
Data sheet: Program – 23: 2025-26 (PDF, 203 KB) (opens in a new tab)
Data sheet Basel: Program – 23: 2025-26 (PDF, 172 KB) (opens in a new tab)
| Time (min) | Motive | Program | (Source-)material |
|---|---|---|---|
| 00:00–01:27 | a: artistic practice, documented | On-the-staircase-footage, ARTCLUB, Vienna, 1994. A clip from the Linda Bilda estate’s stocks. Neither the upstairs ARTCLUB space nor the basement concert are visible. For us, the material works less as historical document than as a thought aid. It offers a symbolic basis for behavioral studies of third wave institutional critical milieus of the 1990s, here Vienna. The camera, compared to Roussopoulos’ interventionist and propagandistic approach, K.ari.n Schneider’s action or attack research, or Bateson’s alleged scientific descriptionist method, is placed at the intersection of auctorial and observational. In the screening, it is mobilized as commentary—on autonomy, critique, and on how rationalization attempts can offer jumping off points for re-mythologization. | IC behavioural studies in Vienna of the 1990s, Linda Bilda |
| 01:27–09:03 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | What Kitnick describes in “Look Who’s Talking” for us acts as good example for cycles of re-mythologizations of rationalization attempts. Antin’s distinction between narrative and story is helpful. References to recent debates around nostalgia, refusal, politicization, and the alleged qualitative decline in artistic expression. The analogy of the taxi cab vs. Uber—introduced as a truncated analysis of capitalism—serves to trace how gestures shift between critique and reaction. The commentary turns to the problem of mediation and immediacy, to the possibility of inhabiting both at once. Is there a form beyond particular artistic examples? | Antin, immediacy mediated, Alex Kitnick |
| 09:03–17:25 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | A contribution from Melinda Cooper based on our inquiry in reaction to Karl Polanyi’s founding myth for the conservative Left’s truncated analysis of capitalism. Helping us to understand why Boltanski/Chiapello and Deleuze/Guattari paved the way for today’s reactionary nostalgia prevalent in institutional critical reruns. Why IC’s obsession with infrastructure and working conditions is what we call re-mythologization of rationalization attempts. And what all that has to do with the naturalization of creativity and care. An attempt to learn from a lacking critique of biologist birth strikes for climate justice, haha, and what La Buse and WFWA could learn from it. Representation vs. redistribution, and why for Fraser (both), Federici, and Kornbluh revolution can only be conservative. On remuneration campaigns and the limits of corporatist demands. A reminder that myths of creativity and care persist at the core of both artistic and reproductive labor. | Family values, Melinda Cooper |
| 17:25–21:54 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | Our perspective on movements like La Buse in France or WFWA in Switzerland is ambivalent. Though they rightly demand fair remuneration for artistic work—often in solidarity with adjacent labor struggles—they remain within the logic of universal basic income, or salaire à vie. Bouteldja critiques this rightfully, although, her reasons might differ from ours. While Friot conceptualized it as PCF member and La Buse influencer. Why do we generally assume union-based approaches to offer anything in cultural sector deeply mythologized. Thought aids on how critique of cultural labor must go beyond redistribution to confront the structural reproduction of, e.g., artistic exceptionalism. | “Universal” “basic” “income,” Houria Bouteldja, Bernard Friot, Wissam Xelka |
| 21:54–26:46 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | Series of transcript excerpts in the form of redacted images. Inserted as commentary on moments where law and art share a gesture: selective contextualization. Mobilized lifes and concepts into predetermined scripts. From the ignored context of a police killing to the re-enchanted taxi cab. Where relevance is naturalized and autonomy returns disguised. Communication may contain a confidential legal services communication. If you are not the intended recipient of this communication, please inform the sender by reply e-mail that the e-mail was not received by the intended recipient, delete all copies of the e-mail from your computer, and destroy any printed copies of the e-mail. Thank you. | Redacted images, Vanessa Place |
| 26:46–32:59 | c: uses of film in education and communication | From a documentary on the 1975 occupation of the Saint-Nizier church in Lyon by local sex workers to denounce their working conditions and police repression. The film helped the protest gain international publicity: the filmed discussions inside the church were broadcast live on a screen outside, drawing public attention. Local media picked up the story, followed by international coverage. | Les prostituées de Lyon parlent, Carole Roussopoulos |
| 32:59–35:30 | d: colour and plains | Colors and plains again, instrumentalized for this screening. Another moment of medium specificity. Episode from an ongoing series. Filming was completed years ago. It remains a video archive that gets reorganized and altered from occasion to occasion. Episodes are reedited or single clips from the archive designated episodes, episodes change numbers and their order is shuffled as needed. | Untitled 14, Leslie Bauer |
| 35:30–37:51 | d: colour and plains | Colors and plains. A rare moment of medium specificity in the program. Together with three other contributions, it represents non-narrativity within the screening as a marker of a Lettrist tradition and focuses on the Vorführ- and Rezeptionssituation (screening situation). Not through disruptive, masculinist, supposedly subversive avant-garde gestures towards the “new.” And without any derogatory relationship with representation from our side. These kinds of contributions can be a break from exerting oneself from a hopefully, either way, absent black-box moment of a continuous narrative. | Distance between here to there, Christina Battle |
| 37:51–49:51 | New York: d, live Vienna: d, live Berlin: b, live |
New York, 16.10.2025, Evelyn Plaschg: Partially commissioned interruption in tonal plains, framed by existing tracks. Flute, voice, field recording and synthesizer. Rhythms might begin to run, meet one another, then miss, and strike beside. Not to pin down what was composed, what arises, the performer watches herself or waits for her cue: voice, between layered melodies and spoken inserts (ambition/rap). Composition draws from industrial textures, baroque canon, folk. Vienna, 18.11.2025, Artjom Astrov: Sounds often stop suddenly, as if they are being caught or redirected. Within the field of rather clicks and taps, it sounds as if objects are being moved or shifted around. Tap-beats that structure the tonal piece have high reverberation tones. Overall, it sounds like a live improvisation with electronic elements, focusing on texture and noise rather than melody or rhythm. A set for a twelve-minute slot, meant as a rehearsal for a concert series. Placed within the screening situation, it could be both a commentary or a piece where strikes and noises become an anti-surface. A contact microphone, bird call drum, and guitar amp are considered instruments in this case. Berlin, 15.01.2026, Mattin: Mattin’s score for tonight’s Private/Public Intervention, January 15, will be executed within a twelve-minute time frame. Listen to the question, please try to answer it and pass it on. Another question would come up at minute six. |
New York: Evelyn Plaschg Vienna: Artjom Astrov Berlin: Mattin |
| 49:51–61:51 | Vienna: b, live Berlin: b, live |
Vienna, 18.11.2025, Miriam Stoney: To shit where one eats: the question remains whether absolute proximity of the self to the same can allow for “critical distance.” Or whether solidarity remains what it always was and still is: the son, abused by the father, terrorizing his mother, while the sister turns a blind eye, loyalty. It’s a family thing. So-called art is what creates the virtual trenches, the site where lifelong, kinship-like bonds between crippled veterans are formed. Suffering together, floundering in something thicker than water. We all love to mingle around a warming campfire. The ‘new’ spirit of capitalism burns hot and fast, authorship and the artistic subject glows throughout the night while everyone lies sleeping, dreaming. The ground dries out, arid and what’s that: Infrastrukturkritik – just great. Crisp, concise, crass. Conspiracy theories, conservative left-wing populism, externalizing, reformist and apologetic critique were always what kept the self-sadism in your average village running. Berlin, 15.01.2026, Eric-John Russell: Drawing on Eric-John Russell’s current work on the critique of Meinung and the editorial project Cured Quail. Opinion appears not as harmless plurality, but as a dominant form of certainty: private, inalienable, and strangely resistant to evidence. The contribution functions as commentary on how opinion replaces knowledge while mimicking its authority. From Trump-era media politics to pandemic discourse, opinion circulates as a shortcut to truth. What does it mean when judgment detaches itself from the madness of the masses and why this detachment feels comfortably reassuring. |
Vienna: Miriam Stoney Berlin: Eric-John Russell |
| 00:00–00:00 | a: artistic practice, documented | Only in New York, 16.10.2025, The video documents the work Sabotage at the closing of the first part exhibition on May 25, 2005, at 6:30 pm at Orchard. A dense fog fills the gallery until visibility fades. Outside firefighters arrive and rush in after a passerby mistook the fog for smoke. The agreed-upon performance involved activating a fog machine at the back of the space, operated by K.ari.n Schneider, along with sound on site by Jutta Koether. It is very releasing for us to see that someone, K.ari.n Schneider, exposed the cathedral of cooperatively organized artist-run exhibition spaces. What we read as a metaphor, making the magic dust visible that covered up the nostalgic reaction that came off the Cologne-NY-axis since the 1990s. A perfect breeding ground for re-mythologizations of alleged rationalizations. Critique of critique, art-as-life, dust to the eyes. The work represents a staged split from the cooperative to show that the collective plan and effort for Orchard had been dismantled from the start. The video is the only record of Schneider and Koether being in the same space at the same time. | Sabotage @ Orchard, K.ari.n Schneider |
| 61:51–70:34 | a: artistic practice, documented | Proposal as path to a solution. A filmed narration of intent—half lecture, half self-analysis—circling the question of field rather than source-subject. Images unfold like prostheses of cognition: representations rehearsing themselves, mediating endlessly between the real and its double. SdA positions itself in a state of cognitive warfare, producing representation against representation, realism against realism. The work asks whether collective image regimes—liberal, anarchist, socialist—remain bound to ownership and subjecthood, or if an alternative can emerge within tactics of collective visual production itself. In the screening, the piece appears as a strategic commercial, a proposal masquerading as method (or vice versa), turning the act of mediation into its own battlefield. We are analyzing a film by SdA (Julia Eichler and Fabian Ginsberg). | Explanation Video, SdA (Strategien der Aufstandsbekämpfung/ Counterinsurgency Strategies) |
| 70:34–82:34 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | Some description along with stories relating the experience of visiting Bernadette Mayer and Philip Good at their home in East Nassau NY, starting circa 2007, where there have been hosted poetries and their students for many years. This is a revised passage from a talk first delivered in Vienna in August 2025, on Bernadette Mayer’s writing as a plastic medium of memory. Everyday and conceptual, rigorous and generous. This part focuses on Mayer’s home/house—a lived space where writing and daily life overlap—alongside reflections on her “Poetry State Forest“ as a model for collective work, where publishing, living, and teaching merge into one ongoing form. | Phil and Bernadette‘s House, Roger van Voorhees |
| 82:34–95:05 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | A contribution from Trevor Stark and Rachel Silveri based on our inquiry in reaction to “Reactionary Art Histories”. Fragments on Hans Sedlmayr and the discipline of art history, combined with recent writing on Artforum and Palestine. Art history’s right wing, reactionary and fascist moments appear not as eccentric deviation but in its best tradition. Of course. The question whether this insight should be used to question artistic practice in its substance and ideological grounding: naturalized as creativity and inherent human faculty and formalized as socially relevant. Or, go on and blame label writers, curators, museum boards, toxic philanthropy, VIP-list-derivate-fascism, or art washing and cooptation. | In the best tradition of our discipline, Rachel Silveri, Trevor Stark |
| 95:05–103:36 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | According to Marx, Proudhon failed to see that economic categories are only abstractions of materialist reality of social relations and are only true insofar as these relationships exist, not the other way around. Thus, he falls into the error of bourgeois economists, who see in these economic categories eternal laws rather. Proudhon, as a result of a mystical reversal, sees abstractions themselves as formulas that have slumbered in the bosom of God since the beginning of the world. | Misunderstandings, Letter on Proudhon by Marx to Annenkov, 1846 |
| 103:36–108:36 | c: uses of film in education and communication | Within the screening, Killing Time is instrumentalized for that endlessly repeated anarchist motive—to kill time. Luckily, this is not the author’s aim. Instead, the everyday routine of getting dressed, here, context-specifically the dilemma of finding the right outfit for a suicide. The filmmaker plays herself, not as an artistic subject but simply as someone who wants to finish it up. | Killing Time, Fronza Woods |
| 108:36–115:19 | c: uses of film in education and communication | Scenes of white middle-class nuclear domestic life in San Francisco in 1951. Filmed by Gregory Bateson and Weldon Kees as part of a study on nonverbal communication. Intercut with books on cybernetics, perception, propaganda, and linguistics. Everyday gestures are rendered as data, intimacy becomes diagrams and care sequences, and life systems. Documentation of reproductive processes slips into its abstraction, oscillating between observation and projection. Bateson’s natural-history method was based on microscopic signals that were allegedly considered in the context of macroscopic speech acts. While in other sociovidistic projects the camera operators thought of themselves as invisible, they also forgot to take into account that “Doris” was actually quite annoyed by them. It is therefore more fun to watch the footage as an ethnography of the filmmakers. Weighing the pros and cons of action research (e.g., bio-documentary) and research on symbolic systems (e.g., sociovidistics) remains a fundamental question. | Communication and Interaction in Three White Families, Gregory Bateson and Weldon Kees |
| 115:19–120:14 | d: colour and plains | The contemporary resurgence of Bar Italia, Smerz, and their sonic contemporaries marks not a revival but a meta-operation: the culture industry‘s recursive processing of its own melancholic apparatus. The contribution refers to „individualized introspection as mass movement.” In times of crisis, the culture industry deploys a precise psychological operation. The Strokes‘ and Interpol‘s early-2000s channeling of The Smiths and Slowdive emerged not as organic artistic response but as systematized affect production during recessionary cycles. Today‘s iteration represents the terminal phase of this operation: nostalgia consuming itself. | Shoegaze revival, Alyssa Van Denburg, Eric Schmid |
| 120:14–132:14 | d: colour and plains | Recording and variation from live-on-site-contribution in New York, 16.10.2025. See d-live-slot-entry, min 141:57–153:57. | No title, Connor Tomaka |
| 132:14–141:57 | d: colour and plains | Colors and plains. Within the screening, Kalah acts as a formal interruption, exemplary and already exhausted, a strategy instrumentalized as break. Kalah is a structuralist video by Dóra Maurer in collaboration with Zoltán Jeney. It translates the moves of an ancient board game into sequences of color and tone. Each stone carries pitch and hue, each move triggers its return. Systematic, rule-bound, constructivist. | Kalah, Dóra Maurer |
| 141:57–153:57 | New York: d, live Vienna: d, live Berlin: d, live |
New York, 16.10.2025, Connor Tomaka: In Perfect Lives Robert Ashley said of composition that it is “the process of constantly making a decision about when you’re going to update what you’ve just done.” Compositions can be understood as attempt at making tools for continuous recalibration, where the computational system blocks certain paths while pointing toward others, making more clear that the productive conditions surrounding these compositions are ultimately an artifact of physical parameters, forces under constraint, in our case pressure. The interpretive work of mystics and theologians transition into the domain of technician-specialists, trained in deterministic and bayesian methods and increasingly reliant on iterative measurement machines. These systems have enabled an exponential expansion in micro-mechanistic quantification while significantly disempowering any individual’s capacity to understand and traverse the objects they describe. Source recordings of infrastructural materials and human voice that were made at Emily Harvey Foundation, CNMAT in Berkeley, and an apartment in San Francisco are part of a compositional system made with computer hardware. Vienna, 18.11.2025, Michaela Kisling: KISLING’s composition method, highly informed by digital processing, and meant for contemporary DJ equipment, subtracts and morphs live recorded flute samples by Ilja Gussarov into concrete snippets. KISLING arranges and distorts her tunes on a set of Pioneer CDJs, enriching this musical experience with direct (live on-site) mixing techniques. Berlin, 15.01.2026, Paul Bonnet: Organized recorded sounds (clarinet, flute, field recordings) and synthesizer sounds by Paul Bonnet. Looped, stretched, and laid out in a way that unfolds them. Approach and eschew narrativity (sequencing, progression) and ambiance (something that is sitting there, maybe just a piece of something larger). Adapting to its acute environment while sticking to the plan. Someone wrote about Paul Bonet (one ‘n’, 1889–1971) that his front and back book cover designs are designed to match the library, not the content they enclose. Later, more industrial designs, some published after his death were based on individual elements from Bonet’s sketches, where the elements are arranged into serial, repetitive patterns not determined by the size or proportion of their base material—more like wallpapers. |
New York: Connor Tomaka Vienna: Michaela Kisling Berlin: Paul Bonnet |
| 153:57–165:57 | New York: b, live Vienna: b, live Berlin: b, live |
New York, 16.10.2025, Paige K. Bradley: Lecture/reading fragments from Drive It All Over Me (S*I*G Verlag, 2023). Kontextkunst and Dekontextkunst: Between conceptual art’s legacy and selection depending on context, or social prognosis. Depending mostly on the lawyer. Passages turn to the juridical as a system of perception, thinking along identity as alleged material. The figure of the conceptual artist appears as case study: rationalization of practice as labor, re-mythologization of practice as life. Between legacy and collapse, commentary changes form. Within the screening, the reading stages how critique becomes narration, narration myth. Vienna, 18.11.2025, Shola von Reinhold: Reading from LOTE. White book project: voluntary prevention of an audience (Infrastructuralists prevent a work from its circulation in an “obviously dysfunctional” market/public sphere); Hermia’s Persona/Gesamtkunstwerk: involuntary dispossession of an audience (Infrastructuralists prevent a non-believer’s work from its circulation in “the” public market/ public sphere). In addition to John Latham’s administrative failure, the reading becomes a loose counter-association: to the cycles of remythologization, in which criticism is at risk of becoming self-referential (a hint at a possibility). Berlin, 15.01.2026, Beatrice Hilke and Vera Lutz: After a short introduction, Beatrice Hilke and Vera Lutz will read from Anna Mendelssohn’s poems. Mendelssohn, along one possible interpretation, invites readers to share aspects of the author’s experiences, while at the same time identifying the readers’ attempts to access her poems with state mechanisms of surveillance and enclosure. For us, the contribution functions as commentary on how law doesn’t only judge actions, but formats readability itself. The reading is mobilized where autonomy returns disguised as relevance, where “context” becomes interrogation, and where writing insists on a form that cannot be processed into evidence. |
New York: Kontextkunst, Dekontextkunst, Paige K. Bradley Vienna: Shola von Reinhold Berlin: Beatrice Hilke and Vera Lutz on Anna Mendelssohn |
| 165:57–167:27 | a: artistic practice, documented | A propaganda film from 1988, designed to be screened in the main hall of the former Red Cross headquarters, rented from the Red Cross by the Situationist International, Vienna section (co-founded by Linda Bilda and Ariane Mueller). It was planned to screen the film continuously—day and night, but after 24 hours, the house got squatted by homeless people and the projection was halted. | Promotional film, S.I. Vienna section, Ariane Mueller |
| 167:27–192:44 | a: artistic practice, documented | Video and comment, placed in relation to Alex Kitnick’s reflections on narrative and immediacy and David Antin’s distinction between narrative and story, expose how narrative/context and mediated gesture fold into cycles of rationalization and re-mythologization. Dustan uses the editing-while-filming technique—the record button. Context and narrative collapse into one another. Ratés is the last film in Dustan’s Tristan series (the two Nous-works together and Ratés is a sort of follow-up to Pietà): “We take the car, and I drive him back from Lille to Zurich, he films me, I look half dead, it’s very moving, say one likes that kind of thing, and then he films the road and the trucks with natural special effects. When you’re talented, you’re talented at everything, as Duras said. I like the idea that he filmed one of my films.” | Ratés, Guillaume Dustan |
| 192:44–193:49 | a: artistic practice, documented | Why is the Artist Placement Group (APG) still the most radical initiative by self-described artists to politicize art structurally that comes at least to our minds at this point. Along John Roberts we cannot think of productivist approaches that avoid being pulled into the cycle of not wanting to give up the status as artist-intellectuals completely, while at the same time, not wanting to return to the notion of the artist as independent producer or critic. This is also where the APG failed, and that it comes to mind as best-of-the-bad, is just sad. A filmed sequence of catalog pages, manifestos, and tables—documents outlining John Latham’s cosmology of “flat time” and the APG’s repositioning of the artist. | Report of a Surveyor, pp. 15–23, John Latham on APG |
| 193:49–195:27 | a: artistic practice, documented | The night scene, shot along a waterway in an urban area this past February, is dominated by the repeated chant “It’s Nights Like This,” the chant which is echoed again via the author’s subtitles. The iterative business of eating, digestion, excretion, or reproduction in general, is performed by the three actor’s in a very accessible and entertaining manner. The cart, the supermarkets and love. We imagine the animated cart, they talk of its family, as a baby itself, which we want to throw into the canal to drown. But then decide, the radical everyday, becomes abstraction, as in a Peter Roehr video, and we start to calm down again. Nights Like This adds a note here to the re-mythologization of the everyday. | Nights like this 24.02.2025, Cammisa Buerhaus |
| 195:27–195:37 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | The wording of a leaflet from 1988, designed and distributed by the Situationist International, Vienna section (founded by Linda Bilda and Ariane Mueller) in a contemporary version as interpreted by the LVM Sora. Video reduces space as opposite to drawing and RL but establishes time by placing it in historical time. The original leaflet doubts collectivity but hints to the wish for joint action to create a supportive environment, that enables or produces subjectivity, a task that can be seen in all of Mueller’s and Bilda’s work. Within a recent email conversation: “When something appears as history, you can be sure that someone has an interest in it.” | Information, Ariane Mueller, Linda Bilda and SORA |
| 195:37–205:05 | b: letter/lecture/text/message | Excerpts from Carl Zuckmayer’s Geheimreport (1943/44), written in U.S. exile for the intelligence service OSS. Character portraits of artists, actors, musicians, and writers who remained in Nazi Germany: Benn, Jünger, Gründgens, Rühmann. A document both useful and trivializing—half intelligence file, half literary sketch. Illuminatingly, he writes as part of the report, “More than anywhere else in the world, there was a prevailing view in Germany that artists bore less social responsibility than other people, that they led a life of their own, so to speak, outside the political, social, and economic order, whose foundation and firmament was the timeless world of the arts. (...)” But Zuckmayer is a conservative, focusing on individual responsibility—from this vantage point, contrary to Herbert Marcuse, who, for the same agency, worked on analyzing the economical and political macrostructures of the NS-state, Zuckmayer wrote very subjective microhistories. A letter between Alice Zuckmayer and documentary filmmaker Nina Gladitz will give more context. | Macroanalysis vs. Microhistories, Carl Zuckmayer, Alice Zuckmayer, Nina Gladitz |
| 205:05–225:09 | c: uses of film in education and communication | During the filming of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo in Peru 1980/81, conflicts arose between Herzog’s film production company Wildlife productions and a group of Peruvian Indigenous Aguaruna peoples. After the community’s council decided not to host and work for Herzog and his film team under the conditions proposed, Herzog called the military on them. Gladitz takes a letter of protest authored by the affected Aguaranas—published in the magazine Pogrom—as her starting point. It reports of a working contract imposed by Herzog’s production company together with the Peruvian military, and violent interventions and arrests. Gladitz shows these events in a polemic against Herzog with the help of the Aguaruna, not simply to denounce Herzog but to confront the structural violence behind the making of an “iconic” film, in open disregard of democratic decision processes. Another of her films from the same year, Zeit des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit (1982), had the working title The Artist’s Responsibility. Land der Bitterkeit und des Stolzes opens with a Jean Renoir quote: “Art that interferes with life for its own sake is obscene.” The parallel that the representation of the Aguaruna community drew between the opera-loving “caoutchouc baron” and “slavemaster” Fitzcarrald and Herzog himself, is commented on by Gladitz in the film: “When the conquest of gold comes at a cost, then the outrage is vast. If the conquest of images comes at a cost, does that increase the value of the images? Is a film review that makes this claim any different from the court reporters of the conquistadors?” | Land of bitterness and pride, on Nina Gladitz |
| 225:09–234:02 | c: uses of film in education and communication | The film follows a campaign to unionize night cleaners. Toilets, offices scrubbed at night, cleaners followed on shift, then in interviews speaking of care work at home—no sleep. In daytime, the boss appears, managing the contracts. Attempts to represent the shifting forces between workers, the Cleaner’s Action Group, and unions collapse into contradictions. Music, vacuuming in slow motion. Within the screening, it is mobilized less as testimony than as a record of instrumentalization itself. Exploitation is visible, but its representation folds workers, activists, filmmakers, and audiences alike into the scene of precarious labor. As part of the sceening this contribution represents a productive instrumentalization of the camera as well as it is a note to ouvselves on the comparison between maintenance/care as labour and art as labour, and its pitfalls. | Nightcleaners, Berwick Street Film Collective |
| 234:02–239:37 | d: colour and plains | Within the screening Latham’s film acts as a formal interruption. A stop motion animated documentation of the production of Latham’s work Film Star, a canvas incorporating books whose pages have been painted in twelve colors. The books can be opened at different pages, therefore the work can exist in different states. In the film, the books open, close and change color. The work is titled Film Star because it’s documented in the film Unedited Material from the Star. | Unedited Material from the Star, John Latham |