In addition to its beauty, the Iranian city of Shiraz is also known for its inhabitants’ leisurely approach to everyday life, them “sleeping a lot, and actually being lazy”. Is it a coincidence that the two world-famous Persian poets Hafis and Saadi come from Shiraz? Does work always involve activity, or can a person also be productive when sleeping, dreaming, reciting a poem or dancing at a rave? The six films in the program confuse the sense and non-sense of work, the working world and productivity from a historical, linguistic and virtual perspective. (Azin Feizabadi)
A small supermarket somewhere in the American backwoods. The staff come in early, drink coffee and restock the shelves. They chat about the air conditioning, would like to read poetry in peace and sometimes even get lucky on the slot machine.… >>>
MY OWN PICTURE is an attempt to find myself in organic forms other than my body, namely in analog amateur films about animals and plants. In a dream world, my identity is constructed from the spoken text that was recorded as a voice message and the images of living beings in the film. In this film, I am anything but myself.… >>>
The video work CLOSE YOUR EYES AND IMAGINE: WORK – A BRAINSTORM WITH HARUN FAROCKI was created in a film workshop with young people in a refugee accommodation in Berlin-Marienfelde, initiated by the group rampe:aktion.
Harun Farocki’s “Workers Leaving the Factory” became the starting point for a playful exploration of the theme of work. Here, Harun Farocki’s cinematic essay enters a poetic dialogue with other voices in search of meaning and meaninglessness in the world of work. By playing with images, words and writing, a remix develops with footage from the Marienfeld neighborhood.
In an age of goal fulfillment, directives, feedback and control, the sender can seem a little abstract.
In THE UNTAPPED POTENTIAL, the sender is a doll. Like an oracle, the doll whispers the information to the messenger, the mediator who passes it on to us employees in the room.
CN: The film works with light effects that can trigger photosensitive people.
NEW CENTURIES ARE RARE establishes a timeline from the 1900s miner strikes to the establishment of the electronic music festival in Norberg a hundred years later, when the rave scene moved into the old industrial buildings. With shots stretching from the political struggles of the miners to the post-industrialization of today, Danish-Swedish artist collective coyote has created a video work shrouded in the fumes of both mining and smoke machines, illustrated by clips from the early rave parties that laid the foundations of alternative club culture in the 1990s as a place not only for hedonistic escapism, but for political activity in theory and practice. Psychological, chemical, and technological rhythms resonate across the archaic topography of the place over a hundred years.
HARDLY WORKING sheds light on extras from the computer game “Red Dead Redemption 2”: NPCs (non-player characters). The non-player characters create a sense of normality in the digital world. With ethnographic precision, the film observes a laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper and a carpenter in their daily routine. Their repetitive activity patterns are only interrupted by bugs. The voice-over analyzes the work of these Sisyphus machines in terms of meaningfulness and resistance in the age of capitalism.… >>>