VIDEONALE.scope #9

How can we rethink resistant forms of coming together, forms where bodies do not have to be physically present to be noticed? How can we reinterpret media images that are used to construct norm/abnorm and stoke fear towards specific groups? What role does the medical industrial complex play in perpetuating inequalities and as a form of violence? In a second part of the programme, the chimpanzee animal psychologist Dr. Zira from the Planet of the Apes-movies concludes by speculating on the aggressive-individualistic behaviour of humans.

With works by Tony Cokes, P. Staff, Martine Syms, Jacolby Satterwhite, Coco Fusco.

Tearoom is based on a found tape of police surveillance footage of a men's restroom in Mansfield, Ohio in 1962. Years before the Stonewall movement, the footage was used in court as evidence to convict the identified men. The minimum sentence for sodomy was one year in jail and psychiatric treatment, including the usual methods such as electric shocks or drugging. The appropriation of the footage tells of a repressed historiography of men who, regardless of class, age or skin color, entered into unions with each other that were able to destabilise the ideology of mainstream society.

William E. Jones, Tearoom, US 1962/2007, Color, 16mm/Digital, 56' (Silent)

Followed by an artist talk with William E. Jones.

What is considered thought and language and what is not? And who has the power to decide about it? How do we communicate chronic pain or mental suffering? How do personal and collective trauma inform each other? And how can so-called negative emotions and feelings be understood not as individually based and "solvable" but as cultural phenomena and political symptoms?

• Mel Baggs, In My Language, 2007
• Imogen Stidworthy, Iris [A Fragment], 2018-19
• Panteha Abareshi, Unlearn the Body, 2019
• Panteha Abareshi, Not Better Yet, 2019
• Carolyn Lazard, Consensual Healing, 2018
• Barbara Hammer, X, 1973
• Karin Michalski und Ann Cvetkovich, 2014
• Thirza Cuthand, Extractions, approx. 2019
• Stan Brakhage, Commingled Containers, 1996

Software Garden is a music album whose 11 tracks weave together influences from pop, electronic and techno with string arrangements. Its cinematic formulation explores the intersections between technology and care work. The collaborative work is structured through poems by poet and disability rights activist Carol R. Kallend, in which she reflects on her desire for a robot companion to fill the void left by the UK government's drastic cuts to welfare services.

Rory Pilgrim, Software Garden, UK/NL 2016-18, Color, Digital, 51'29'' (Engl. OF)

Followed by an artist talk with Rory Pilgrim and Carol R. Kallend.

This para-documentary portrait of R.D. Laing (1927-1989) offers insight into the life and work of the notorious Scottish psychiatrist, considered a pioneer of the anti-psychiatric movement, who had a profound impact on the understanding of the social and political dimensions of mental difference, psychological distress and suffering. Fowler's poetic collage, whose title borrows from Laing's best-known work, The Devided Self (1960), weaves together archival footage from the period of the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s with his own sensitive cinematic observations.

Luke Fowler, All Devided Selves, UK 2011, b/w and color, 16mm/Digital, 93' (Engl. OF)

Photography and beyond - Part 26, Chapter 3 of the Streetscapes series and not only its grandmasterly centerpiece: a dialogue turned into a film between an analyst and his analysand, an obsessed yet blocked filmmaker, about architecture and trauma, shot in ensembles by Julio Vilamajó, Eladio Dieste and Arno Brandlhuber.

Heinz Emigholz, Streetscapes [Dialogue], DE 2017, Color, Digital, 133' (Engl. OF, GE UT)