the documentary model

 

 

 

Clara Bausch
Igor & Ivan Buharov
Andreas Bunte
Simon Faithfull  
Marcin Malaszczak
Marike Schuurman 

exhibition: 29.09 – 20.10.2017

The Documentary Model features works by artists that use devices from documentary film making, but do not define their work as documentaries. During the exhibition, the films will be shown in the following sequence:

Wednesday

1:00 pm:
Oder Center Berlin
Clara Bausch
Length       19:45

 

(…) Das Gelände der ehemaligen Papierfabrik beherbergt in seinen Ruinen seit 1990 einen der größten Märkte im Grenzgebiet zwischen Polen und Deutschland. An diesem Ort des Transits, der Grenzerfahrungen sowie der Geschichte einer Arbeitswelt von einst, heute und morgen untersucht die Künstlerin in Oder Center Berlin Relikte wie auch Möglichkeiten eines Neudenkens von Ort. Abgefilmtes Bildmaterial der Vergangenheit und Szenerien der Gegenwart vereinen sich zu narrativen Fragmenten, während das kakophonische Treiben um den Verkauf die stillgelegten Maschinen mithören lässt. Der Sound wird zum abstrakten Moment, der die Überlagerungen von Historie transferiert.(…) Auszug aus Ausstellung-Text: Constanze Musterer

with technical support by
Gut Neuendorf, LaborBerlin e.V., Kodak Motion
Technik,Cinepostproduction, Geyer Berlin
and many others

Oder Center Berlin was realized with the support of the Representative of the Federal Ministry for the Arts and Media, Germany

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1:30 pm: 
Safe Disassembly 
Andreas Bunte
Length       37:45

Safe Disassembly documents the careful dissection of cluster ammunition into individual components in a demilitarisation facility outside Berlin. 
With the Convention on Cluster Munitions, an international treaty signed by 97 countries that ‘prohibits all use, stockpiling, production and transfer of Cluster Munitions’, vast numbers of this type of ammunition became obsolete. In a small village, two hours outside Berlin, the demilitarisation division of a Norwegian ammunition producer has established an operational facility for the disassembly of cluster ammunition. The division uses the facilities of a former workshop of the GDR where missiles were serviced and produced for the GDR National People’s Army and the Russian Red Army. In order to disassemble large quantities of ammunition quickly and safely, the company had to developed special automated machinery. In contrast to most recycling procedures in which scrap material is ground, melted or otherwise decomposed, the dissection of cluster ammunition plays out as an inversion of the production process resembling an assembly line.
Safe Disassembly has been funded and co-produced by the Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme.

 

SAFE DISASSEMBLY dokumentiert die sorgfältige Zerteilung und Zerlegung von Streumunition in ihre Einzelteile in einer Demilitarisierungs-Einrichtung in der Nähe von Berlin. 

Mit der Streubomben-Konvention von 2010, einem von 97 Staaten unterzeichneten völkerrechtlichen Vertrag über ein Verbot des „Gebrauchs, der Lagerung, Herstellung und Weitergabe von Streumunition“, sind große Mengen dieser Munition obsolet geworden. In einer kleinen ostdeutschen Ortschaft betreibt die Entmilitarisierungs-Abteilung eines norwegischen Munitionsherstellers eine Anlage zur Demontage von Streumunition. Sie befindet sich in einer ehemals von der DDR genutzten Werkstatt, in der Fernlenkgeschosse für die Volksarmee und die Rote Armee produziert und gewartet wurden. Um große Mengen von Munition schnell und sicher demontieren zu können, mussten spezielle, vollautomatische Maschinen entwickelt werden. Während bei den meisten Recycling-Verfahren Altmaterial vergraben, eingeschmolzen oder auf andere Weise entsorgt wird, gleicht die Zergliederung der Streumunition einem inversen, der Fließbandherstellung ähnlichen Produktionsprozess.

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2:15 pm:
Slow Mirror
Igor & Ivan Buharov
Length       01:24:42

Do you know what barman pours for spirits? Do you know what drink the barman pours? If your lover pours the drink, it’s your destruction, if the drink is fiery, inside it brings illumination. Drink intoxication’s drink, be consumed by love! A drop happily seeks its death in the ocean’s water. All the world’s a bar and things in it merely glasses,our friend raises his glass for us and we pay the bill, even wisdom is drunk, descending into stupor, earth and heaven are drunk, and all the angels too.

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Thursday

1:00 pm
Fuji

Marike Schuurman
Length       08:45

In Central China orchards of Fuji apples are undergoing a full metamorphosis. Apple farmers are climbing into the trees repeatedly to wrap and unwrap each apple separately in and out of paper bags. This enormously labour-intensive work is done with an incredible amount of concentration, meditatively.

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1:15 pm:
Sieniawka

Marcin Malaszczak
Length       02:05:58

 

synopsis

SIENIAWKA is a journey into the irrational subconscious of humanity. STEFAN attempts to make his way through a post-industrial no-man’s land. An encounter with a stranger forces the line between reality and imagination to become blurred. The future and the past become intertwined. Visions of another time emerge from Stefan’s mind. The cold-blooded surgeon used to work in the dissecting room. There was a cinema where everyone would go on the weekend. A state of complete delirium caused a young man’s heart to stop beating. In drifting through memory and the imaginary, Stefan witnesses death, mental illness and the margins of humanity in a passing world that resembles our own. All that remains are ruins – everything begins to dissolve. The concrete world no longer resembles the one that he was forced to leave. Internal chaos is mirrored by external chaos.

director’s statement

At the heart of the village SIENIAWKA lies a “hospital for the treatment of mental illness, nervous disorders and alcoholism“.
It was founded in 1964 on the site of a Nazi labour camp.
Today, one half of the camp is occupied by “the hospital“, the other half functions as living quarters for Polish families.
The hospital served as a point of departure from which the whole film developed. As the story evolved, it grew to include the immediate surroundings and the people living, working or being treated there.
My cinematographic involvement and indeed the need to be involved with this unique place originate from the time I spent there during various phases of my life. I have a very strong, close, emotional relationship with it. My aunt worked at the hospital for forty years (twenty of which were in the position of Alternate Director), whilst my grandfather was Administrative Director for the same period of time. Due to my familiarity with the hospital and the village, I was basically given carte blanche by the current hospital director to move freely on site and on the wards. These are usually very hard to access or film due to the secure and restricted nature of this type of institution. The word Sieniawka, although officially referring to the name of the village, is used colloquially to refer to the hospital. When someone says you will end up in Sieniawka, that person means you will eventually go insane and be put away there. This linguistic generalisation – blurring the line between the mentally ill and the sane, chaos/order or nature/civilization – inspired me to conceive and realise this film there. I wanted to explore these ambivalent topics cinematographically and in relation to a rapidly changing post-communist Polish society, and I wanted to do this by revealing and focusing on what is being left behind and marginalised, what is not being talked about and what is in all of us – the irrational subconscious of humanity. Society in itself is an institution which constantly standardises human beings. Can ultimate freedom only come from death? I wanted to make a film that is a journey through memory and the imaginary in a world that resembles our own, but is not necessarily ours.

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3:30 pm:
0º00 Navigation, Part I: A Journey Across England

Simon Faithfull
Length      50:37

 

The film 0º00 Navigation, Part I: A Journey Across the Landmass of England shows an obsessive and deranged journey exactly along the Greenwich Meridian.

Always seen from behind, a figure first swims out of the seawater where the meridian hits the south-coast of Britain at Peacehaven in Sussex. The solitary person emerges out of the water carrying a hand held GPS device and using this implement he proceeds to walk directly north along the 0º00’00” line of longitude. Any obstacle encountered is negotiated – fences climbed, properties crossed, buildings entered via nearest windows, streams waded, hedges crawled through. The figure gradually makes his way up through southeast Britain, through London, the Midlands and ultimately re-enters the sea at Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. The figure then slowly swims away into the North Sea heading ever further north.