Director
A few years ago, German artists Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki conducted workshops on the subject of work in 15 cities around the world. The result was the creation of 400 short films depicting various faces of work in the modern world. Now Antje Ehmann and architect Luis Feduchi have returned to the project, this time with filmmakers from Warsaw and Berlin. Will the films made be able to show how the pandemic influenced work and professional reality? Can all the changes occurring be captured in the form of an image? Will the movies themselves change? The German title of the project "Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit" has a double meaning: it means working in one film take and at the same time an attitude towards work.
Production Assistant
In Comparison revisits issues explored in the director's 2007 two channel installation Comparison Via a Third. Spanning continents and cultures, the film focuses on the brick in its many contexts, from the collective efforts of a community building a clinic in Burkina Faso, through semi industrialized moldings in India, to industrial production lines in Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland. Through its notable structure and its captivating rhythms, In Comparison presents various methods of labor production, allowing for an assessment that changes with every layer and goes well beyond a simple binary divide.
Director
Feasting or Flying by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann alludes to the statement: "Some dissect a bird in order to eat it, others in order to discover how to fly". A six- channel deconstruction of the tragic male hero in cinema.
Idea
Examines monuments scattered all over the world that have become goals for pilgrims and tourists and now serve to meet a whole range of different needs, from personal memory to spiritual enlightenment and religious sentiment. Farocki starts from the Vietnam Memorial in Washington ... thousands of people visit it every day, touch the letters and trace the names of family and friends in an attempt to establish a link between their own lives and the past. Other objects of pilgrimage – including the foot of the statue of the Apostle in St Peter’s and the Bocca della Verità in Rome as well as the devil’s footprint in the Frauenkirche in Munich and the monument in the Buchenwald concentration camp – meet the same need for understanding and purification. Stone is the material in which the collective memory of a life or an event in the past is immortalized and becomes an object of worship. At the same time, the memory of thousands of visitors is preserved in the traces of wear it displays.
Director
A soliloquy by Robert de Niro. The ever same image, the words in seven languages.
Idea
The diagrams used to help represent consumer shopping baskets, the pensions deficit or migration are anachronistic, Farocki posits; Whether pictographs or simple bar or pie charts, their abstractions all display an impotence of information. "Examples of diagrams gleaned from newspapers, school text books and official publications are [...] the history of migration in the Federal Republic of Germany. What we are seeking, therefore, is a conceptual critique of the ways in which migration is presented, pursuing the icons and symbols back to their origins and examining them with regard to content they themselves are unaware of." -HF
