Film programme

There has been a lot of speculation in the past two years about what significance cinema will probably (still) have when the audience is once again able to congregate to watch films together. For festivals like the EMAF, the cinema as a place for encounters and direct exchange between artists and audience has always played and continues to play a central role, and that much more after a forced break of two years. We would therefore like to celebrate our return to the festival cinemas with you with a multifaceted, sensuous, and ambitious programme. Many of the artists participating in the programme will be on hand to present their films and discuss them with us.

The films of the International Competition are a central focus. The eight programmes provide an overview of the diversity and current developments in the field of experimental and artistic short films. They take a critical look at the built and natural spaces in which we live and trace the stories embedded in them. They interleave personal memory, literature, and legends to paint a new, multi-layered picture of our present. They search for forms for putting handed-down knowledge in circulation anew – using the means of song, dance, and music. They play with film as a medium of illusion and spectacle and experiment with its material characteristics and narrative possibilities. They thus make it possible to experience the cinema space as a space of shared sensual experience.

The six contributions to the Feature Films section share an interest in the complex relationship between the body and politics. What are thus concerned, for instance, are the possibilities to express one’s own identity in and through language, to evade external attributions, and to have one’s political concerns heard, or also the material conditions under which reproductive work (and emancipation from it) take place today. In another case, a recurring dream of the filmmaker becomes an occasion for him to look for traces of the past, whose upheavals continue to have an impact today, in home videos of his own family. Finally, a classic of the queer-feminist avantgarde cinema of the 1990s and a polyphonic new version of One Thousand and One Nights based on the love journal of the filmmaker redraw the boundaries between individual and collective bodies.

Artists are ever more frequently choosing documentary means to address the political and social reality of the present or the pictures and narratives of the past. This is also reflected in the film selection for EMAF. In the series Implication. On Documentary Ethics, we would like to address some of the ethical questions that arise when working with documentary material. For this, four artists from the international competition were invited to choose films that shed light on the topic from various perspectives and to discuss them with the audience. It is thus about working with and appropriating found material, depicting closeness and intimacy, dealing with politically motivated censorship, and questions of access and publication.

The film programme responding to the festival theme The thing is was put together by Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat. It’s rather a verb brings together current and historical works that focus on things as process, action, and interaction. They take a look at the soft, mutable contours of things, their openness to and ability to be shaped by other things, but also by experiences of violence, care, and community. In particular, they thus deal with the dynamics and permeability that film facilitates as a time-based medium. In addition to seven film programmes, It’s rather a verb also includes a live performance that can be experienced at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

Two film artists whose works have received a lot of international attention and been shown at renowned exhibition institutions, but have been represented to a lesser extent at festivals are honoured as Artists in Focus. The Puerto-Rican artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is presenting a broad selection of her filmic works for the first time in Germany. They bring together documentary, fictional, and performative elements so as to shed light on the natural and political landscapes of the Caribbean, the history and present of anticolonial movements, and the aesthetically and socially subversive power of feminist storytelling. Emily Wardill, whose film Night for Day was awarded the EMAF Award last year, provides insights into her filmic works of the past fifteen years. In these, the instability of language and consciousness, the spectres of technology, and the materiality of memory are recurring themes. Her extremely sensuous experimental films make use of a very idiosyncratic mixture of scientific discourse and absurd wit, political analysis, and playful allusions.

Exhibition

The mass of human-made things — objects, machines, and buildings — has meanwhile come to exceed the overall living biomass on the planet. Statements about our society can be made based solely on this fact. The presence and amount of things is not only an important characteristic of the age of the Anthropocene; it also makes reference to the notion of the ‘Wasteocene’ after Marco Armiero / Yvonne Volkart. The term describes the fears articulated in connection with garbage dumps and radioactive waste sites, sorts of new geological layers, since something is always left behind. At the same time, this era is characterized by extractive and exploitative ‘wasting or disposable relationships’ with other people, beings, things, and matter.

These contexts and power structures are inscribed in the things we produce, use, desire, preserve, and throw away. Beyond their function and significance, things embody needs, interests, or ideas and make reference to the way in which we live with others and our environment. They are condensed social relationships and material witnesses to our existence, even if these never become entirely visible in the objects themselves.

If we take a look at our relationship to objects, it quickly becomes apparent that it is not really that clear where our body ends and the inanimate world begins. We are shaped by the things around us, not always quite as obviously as, for instance, in connection with our computers and mobile phones. Do we give objects life or do objects allow our body to express itself? People and things configure each other reciprocally; their interactions are forms of physical, social, political, economic, and ecological negotiations.

The question of whether we can truly comprehend the things around us as purely passive, inanimate, mute objects thus arises. Quasi-objects and hybrids like artificial intelligence, frozen embryos, or psychoactive substances complicate our relationship to things. How would we deal with feeling machines? What does it mean if nature, as, for instance, in the form of the rainforest, is given the status of a legal subject that is able to defend itself against extractivism and pollution? Where do we draw the boundaries between object and subject, nature and society, technology and body?

At the same time, people and living beings are deprived of rights and treated like things in asymmetrical power relations such as slavery, economy, animal husbandry, medicine or in gender relations. Othering and objectification in the commodity form makes everything consumable, and forms the basis for exploitation and disposable relations.

The artists in the exhibition The thing is seek alternative notions of being in the world — away from those that focus exclusively on humans. They consider how we can design, produce and consume more sustainably, so that human-made things are fully integrated into the earth’s metabolism. To do this, they sometimes use archaeological materialist or speculative approaches, consider the relationship between body and thing from a queer, disabled perspective, play with object-subject relations as well as shifts in meaning, or experiment with the design of self-decomposing objects.

Talks

Things matter. They matter for the role they play in everyday life, but also for the material and immaterial traces they leave behind. Understood as material, inanimate objects, they have their own life cycles, and they gain or lose value and significance depending on different time periods and cultural contexts.

Things tell stories. They narrate stories of loss and belonging, past and present, reality and fiction. Things can reveal positions of power and moments of resistance. Often, they might involve hierarchies, imply forms of exclusion and serve as witnesses of events and actions.

Things are never just things. They might be human-made or found in the living environment. Some are designed and manufactured, while others might be aggregates, formations or even living organisms. All, however, are made of matter and earth’s resources and return to the planet’s body.

Things have agency. Smart things can hear and speak, monitor moves and capture emotions. Non-human personhood is addressed nowadays in relation to the changes that artificial intelligence brings but it is also a recurrent issue concerning the personhood and the rights of ‘nature’, its ecosystems and entities.

But then what is – and what is not – a thing? What does a world of things signify today, and for whom?

The talks programme of EMAF 2022 explores what it means to live with and take care of things while having in mind different temporalities, ontologies and worldviews. It examines the role of art, design and technology in creating, appropriating or calling off things in order to establish or restore substantial relationships to the environment and the planet. Talks specifically discuss the challenges and possibilities of designing for multiple worlds, of working and living with smart infrastructures, of acknowledging the agency of the living environment, and of respecting the circle of matter. Reflecting upon the connectedness of the living with the nonliving, theorists and practitioners invited by ΕMAF 2022 will discuss the meanings, benefits and costs of things in relation to both human and more-than-human worlds.

Campus

The festival section EMAF Campus offers a fascinating platform for classes and specialist groups of European art academies and universities. Students from Vienna, Amsterdam, Halle an der Saale, Braunschweig, Bremen, and Osnabrück enliven the festival cinemas and various locations in the city centre of Osnabrück with their own film programmes and multifaceted exhibitions.

The programme AMATEURINNEN* arose from the collaboration between the Austrian Film Museum and the department of art and digital media of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Works by women* from the holdings of the film museum served as the starting point. The screening includes films by students that examine these works’ artistic strategies and feminist, political potentials.

In the Amsterdam Film Academy’s new degree programme for artistic research in and through film, research and debates, experimentation and process stand in the foreground. Students present works that examine personal memories, the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the power dynamic of shifting gazes.

The specialist time-based arts class of the Burg Giebichenstein college of art in Halle regards itself as a research team. The participants translate their ideas and contents into narrative and experimental films, sound, built and media spaces, body and movement, and the material and the immaterial with various means and media and thus develop an independent artistic language and position.

A political and simultaneously experimental approach is central to the specialist spatial concepts class of the HBK Braunschweig. The students enter a past archive with a sensual gaze, return to the political present with critical forethought, and create an eloquent space of current ideas.

The time-based art class of the HfK Bremen examines a visually and acoustically overstimulated world, detects not least content factories, and comprehends time as a fragile medium that forms echo chambers. Have you ever felt the need to take your screen and simple let it crash to the floor? There are reasons for this, which are revealed in a critical, experimental way.

The Institute of Art / Art Education of the University of Osnabrück is also participating with several works. New communication and exhibition concepts are created in a robot workshop in which a telepresence robot is used in two ways. Based on a sound research project, a multi-channel installation that interweaves various acoustic works to create a collective resonance space was produced for a former multi-storey car park.