Everything Happens on the Surface

FILM PROGRAM
December 6 – 8, 2013

With films and videos by:
Eric Baudelaire, Bureau of Inverse Technology, Cylixe, Redmond Entwistle, Kevin Jerome Everson, Zachary Formwalt, Luke Fowler, Gerhard Friedl, Cyprien Gaillard, Marine Hugonnier, Volko Kamensky, Patrick Keiller, Hilary Koob-Sassen, David Lamelas, Michael Robinson, Ben Russell, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Curator:
Katrin Mundt

Admission to all films is free of charge.

The three-day film program Everything Happens on the Surface explores landscape as a surface in movement. It operates under the assumption that landscape is not an actuality of the natural and man-made environment, but rather arises from a continuous process of handling and reworking, through which the effects of political and societal forces manifest. It is not only something formed; it also engenders forms itself. Inscribed into landscape are the effects of different political interests, yet it also reacts to the conditions under which agency comes to pass in the context of society.

Everything Happens on the Surface sheds light on the hypothesis that film makes landscape both visible as a surface in movement and experienceable in a special way. This implies that film—in contrast to painting or photography, for instance—allows landscape to temporally evolve from the outset. But more importantly, it means that experimental films and videos in particular develop strategies that allow landscape to be viewed as an inscription of conflicting forces. The film program focuses on occurrences that act upon landscapes and that turn these landscapes into physical and mediatic surfaces. Films are shown that document and stage these events, thus opening them for critical or speculative new interpretations.

PROGRAM

F r i d a y ,  D e c e m b e r  6 ,  2 0 1 3

8 p.m.
Volko Kamensky, Divina Obsesión, DE 1999, 16mm, 28’
A society that efficiently regulates traffic creates much more than just clear roads in the process. A reflection on the architectural and transcendental dimensions of the roundabout.

Marine Hugonnier, travelling amazonia, GB 2006, DVD, 24’
A journey along the Trans-Amazonian Highway. Planned in the seventies during the military dictatorship, the highway dissects the continent like a horizontal line. An approximation of a colonial gesture that extends beyond mere form.

Patrick Keiller, The End, GB 1986, 16mm, 18’
“The travelogue of a pedestrian, which expounds (amongst other things) the convenient but inept supposition that ‘in any train of thought, the END of one is followed by the beginning of the next.’” (P. Keiller). A systematic foiling of straight lines.

9.30 p.m.
Eric Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images, FR 2011, HD Video, 66’
Fukeiron refers to a movement in Japanese filmmaking that attempted to make visible the inscription of societal mechanisms of suppression in the landscape surrounding them in the sixties. Against the backdrop of superimposed filmic landscapes, Baudelaire interlaces the history of the groups’ most important theorist Masao Adachi with the odyssey of Fusako Shigenobu, a leader of the Japanese Red Army, and her daughter May.

S a t u r d a y ,  D e c e m b e r  7 ,  2 0 1 3

6 p.m.
Gerhard Friedl, Hat Wolff von Amerongen Konkursdelike begangen?, AT/DE 2004, DVD, 71’
“Alfons Müller Wipperfürth is a textile industrialist. Alfons Müller Wipperfürth started out with seven workers and three sewing machines in 1931. He sold goods in front of factory gates, straight from the truck bed. Later he had a different key for each of his branches.” A labyrinthine, ramose catalogue of entanglements involving large-scale entrepreneurship and politics. An exploration of Germany as a home for business.

7.30 p.m.
Cylixe, Una ciudad en una ciudad, DE 2012, HD Video, 18’
Twenty years ago, construction on a new financial center in Caracas, Venezuela, was halted and has never resumed. Today this architectural skeleton is the tallest occupied building in the world.

Cyprien Gaillard, Cities of Gold and Mirrors, GB/MX/DE 2009, DVD, 9’
Against the backdrop of Aztec temples and futuristic hotel complexes, tourists carry out seemingly archaic rituals of dissolution. Landscape viewing that spans both dissimulation and assimilation.

Zachary Formwalt, Unsupported Transit, NL 2011, HD Video, 15’
Set at the construction site of the new stock exchange in Shenzhen, China, this video reflects on the correlations between filmic time-lapse technology, Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of movement, and Karl Marx’s reflections on the “abbreviated form of capital.”

Bureau of Inverse Technology, BIT Plane, GB/USA 1999, DVD, 15’
Guerrilla technology being tested above Silicon Valley.

Redmond Entwistle, Walk-Through, GB/USA 2012, HD Video, 18’
A tour of the California Institute of the Arts campus in Los Angeles, where hope was invested in realizing the ideal of democratic art education by way of architecture. In a classroom students are discussing Michael Asher’s “post-studio art” and the power of language in the art system.

9 p.m.
Hilary Koob-Sassen, Transcalar Investment Vehicles, GB 2012, HD Video, 65’
A natural catastrophe triggers an algorithm with calculations that in turn reprogram the global economic system. It ends not in collapse, but with the utopian vision of a radically new kind of economic activity and cohabitation—propelled by the movement of an endless loop of feedback between living organism and built environment.
 
S u n d a y ,  D e c e m b e r  8 ,  2 0 1 3

6 p.m.
Kevin Jerome Everson, The Island of St. Matthews, USA 2013, HD Video, 69’
The Tombigbee River spilled onto the riverside in the US state of Mississippi in 1973. In the ensuing flood the filmmaker’s parents lost everything that could have been passed down to later generations as mementos. A reconstruction of the related events. An evocation of a river.
 
7.30 p.m.
Ben Russell, Trypps #7 (BADLANDS), USA 2010, HD Video, 10’
In just one single shot this film documents the LSD trip of a young woman in Badlands National Park. An intimate survey and formal study of landscape as a mirror.
 
Michael Robinson, You Don’t Bring Me Flowers, PR 2005, 16mm, 8’
Spreads in National Geographic magazine resurrect the past as panorama and project historical fears onto us in the present.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Farmacopea, USA 2012, 16mm, 6’
A filmic index of poisonous and hallucinogenic plants in Puerto Rico. An attempt at remedying the potential dangers at the core of any community.

Luke Fowler, Bogman Palmjaguar, GB 2007, DVD, 30’
The portrait of a man diagnosed as socially and mentally “disturbed” who has retreated to the solitude of the Scottish moorland. Fowler’s pictures accompany his narrative like ephemeral metaphors for his emotional state of being.

9 p.m.
David Lamelas, The Desert People, USA 1974, 16mm, 48’
A conceptual road movie: five people are traveling in a car through the North American desert. In quasi-documentary scenes they report on their experiences with the society and culture of the Papago Indians. A film about filmmaking and the alienation of the familiar in images.

CREDITS

Everything Happens on the Surface
A film program in the framework ofthe project Politics of Form – accompanying the exhibition Giving Form to the Impatience of Liberty

Curator: Katrin Mundt
Film projection: Holger Ziegler

Lenders:
the artists
Galería Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan
Galerie Greta Meert, Brüssel
Lightcone, Paris
LUX Artists’ Moving Image, London
Max Wigram Gallery, London
Picture Palace Pictures, New York
Real Fiction Film, Köln
Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London

An event in the context of Politics of Form

Supported by
Filmstiftung Baden-Württemberg
Europäische Kommission, Brüssel
Kulturamt der Stadt Stuttgart
Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst des Landes Baden-Württemberg
Innovationspreis Baden-Württemberg