Lecture series with focus on film

The nGbK Lectures series resumes with a focus on film between November 2023 and February 2024. An evening in November explores the past and present of feminist film collectives. From December through February, monthly screenings continue the X-Properties project’s interrogation of financial capital’s impact on a city’s social and cultural production.

November 24, 2023, 7pm
Toward New Spaces—Feminist film and video collectives today
Captain Fiffy: Wassermusik (Water Music), 2022, 8 minutes
Isabell Spengler, Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl: Die Hörposaune (The Listening Trombone), 2022, 31 minutes
Neozoon: Lake of Fire, 2022, 11 minutes
Gossing & Sieckmann: Souvenir, 2019, 20 minutes

In the 1980s, collectives were widespread in the fields of experimental film and video art. In many cases, such a collective approach, based on mutual support and group commitment, was the only option, since the necessary equipment, from camera to editing suite, was beyond the financial means of individual artists. During this period, there were also feminist collectives created to subvert the patriarchal order of filmmaking.

In the meantime, structural change has taken place in these fields. In the 1990s, a neoliberal mindset based on individual property seems to have taken hold, and many feminist collectives disappeared, with Bildwechsel (Hamburg) and Circles (London) among the few exceptions that have survived into the present.

Today, film equipment is cheaper; films and video art are far easier to make, using mobile phones or on the computer at home. In spite of this, there is a growing interest in collective working methods, and the number of feminist and queer collectives is on the rise. Where does this need to form alliances come from?

Followed by a discussion between several of those involved in these productions on the theme of “Collective art production today. Utopia or opportunity?”, moderated by Ingrid Wagner and Kat Lawinia Gorska.

In cooperation with attaque(e)r le visible.

X Properties: The film series
How do the forces of financial capital impact on a city’s social and cultural production? How can the goal of urban development for the common good be promoted in the face of gentrification and displacement driven by the booming real estate market? In the fall of 2022, these questions were addressed by X Properties, a nGbK project that dealt with the nGbK’s own situation of its premises at Oranienstraße 25 in Berlin-Kreuzberg being sold to a Luxemburg-based real-estate investment fund. Produced as part of this project, the eleventh issue of Berliner Hefte zu Geschichte und Gegenwart der Stadt combines Berlin case studies with global perspectives on the de-/financialization of the city.

On the occasion of the publication of the English e-book version of X Properties by EECLECTIC, the nGbK is hosting a series of three film screenings that return to this debate about the economization of urban life. The four artistic/activist films explore models for coworking and cohabitation that intrude far into private spheres; reflect on the scope for individual action within the banking system; and look at migration, belonging, and memory as conditions of space-related power relations in techno-capitalism.

Good Life (2022) by Μarta Dauliūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė documents the everyday life of a group of young people who rent “sleeping pods” measuring just a few square meters in a shared house in central Stockholm; Tech Farm, the start-up operating the facility, inspires them to lead their entire social life as a business operation:entrepreneurship becomes part of theinnermost self and community becomes a commodity. In DREXCIYA or becoming transparent, translucent, transmaterial (2017), Yvonne Wilhelm interweaves biographical storytelling and acoustic historiography in a new interpretation of the migratory movement of the trans-oceanic slave trade. In Twilight City (1989) by the Black Audio Film Collective, the journalist Olivia wanders around London in the early days of neoliberalism; in a letter to her mother, who returned to the Dominican Republic many year previously, she tells of her search for evidence of the ways wealth inequality becomes inscribed into the city, what home means, and what it may once have meant to her mother. The Broken Pitcher (2022) centers on a family’s negotiations with their lending bank about the looming repossession of their home in Larnaka; Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian present this real event that took place in 2019 using reconstructions from memory, followed by commentaries by various individuals answering the question: What do you think the bank officials should have done?

December 2, 2023, 7pm
Good Life
Μarta Dauliūtė, Viktorija Šiaulytė, 2022, 72 minutes
Followed by a Q&A with the directors

January 13, 2024, 7pm
DREXCIYA or becoming transparent, translucent, transmaterial
Yvonne Wilhelm/knowbotiq, 2017, 21 minutes
Followed by a Q&A with Yvonne Wilhelm

February 10, 2024, 7pm
The Broken Pitcher
Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, Peter Eramian, 2022, 69 minutes
Followed by a Q&A with Natascha Sadr Haghighian