Introduction

A node of social disadvantage, power structures, and ideologically deadlocked discourses manifests itself in the current crises and phenomena discussed in the media. This complexity is often countered by one-dimensional ideological explanatory patterns: inequality and injustice are accepted as part of a larger whole; complex issues are brought down to a single justification.

Just as the works should not be read as answers, Orbit, in its entirety, is only one experiment within a discursive network with a preference for intersectional, networked theories. As one-dimensionality and simple explanations are often considered easy ways out of these complex patterns —and we are repeatedly trapped into creating straightforward counter-narratives in the very same way—, it is important that the selected works do not provide this unambiguity but only let us retrace the complexity of conflicting (inter-)actions. Orbit follows their trajectories, which arise between attraction and free fall: While the unambiguity of the narration disappears, all the factors drifting apart determine a centre and its Orbit.

Videos online: January 9 — 10, 2021

The Real Office in Conversation with Ane Hjort Guttu

In your work, we see all these frictions within socially engaged art, community-based projects, political or activist art that are often discussed, but also the tension towards a more formalist, l’art pour l’art approach. What was at the core of starting this film project?

I was an art student myself, and after graduating I started teaching in art schools. So, I have a close relationship with art schools and the different types of students and artistic strategies, which you start recognizing after a while. In my experience, most students find themselves between going directly into some kind of political or social situation or withdrawing to an autonomous ethics or formalism, claiming that it’s another way of being political. Most art students struggle with the idea that they are not really contributing, not really ‘useful’ in a political sense.

The idea for the film came from walking past beggars and wondering what to do: you can pass by and give nothing or you can give something—but in any case you feel bad. This is what the protagonist, Damla, articulates in the film. I thought about whether there could be a ‘third way’ to deal with this particular situation. For example, you could sit down beside the person and thereby act out a kind of solidarity or equality. But who could actually do such a thing? Maybe an art student? Because I myself would not do it, but I think a more idealist, younger, and struggling character could act out a project like that. That was the starting idea of the film Time Passes. I am interested in the idea of the third way; where what artists can do is navigate in closed situations, situations where you seem to have very limited options. An artist is someone who is capable of thinking about alternative strategies or somewhere else to go.

It is really interesting that, in order to deal with this, you invented an art project so close both to reality and to projects actually ideated in art schools.

I tried to make it very realistic and, of course, a lot of people think it’s a documentary. I don´t want to pretend it’s a documentary, usually I tell people that it’s fiction. Some get very disappointed then, they seem to really want this project to have happened.

This leads back to the idea of the ‘third way’, and to the question of whether there is an escape route from established artistic practices. The film seems to provide a reflection on what art can or cannot achieve in such situations. If we consider the development of Damla and her artistic or social practice throughout the story, the practice of art schools is heavily questioned. But artists are still influenced by critics, art schools, and the general discourse on art—where do you see the possibility of a social and political relevance of art among these forces?

The conclusion in the film is that Damla cannot show her work. Or; she refuses to show her work because it doesn’t feel right towards her friend Bianca. So, she finds herself again facing a choice with two options: showing the work or not. But then I was lucky to have a third option; which is to show her work through my film. I like this triangular dynamic. In a scene in the middle of the film, the student group discusses Breugel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. And this painting, as well as W. H. Auden´s poem about it, contains the same triangular set-up: there are the sufferers and then there are the people who don´t see the sufferers. But then there is also a third eye, which is the artist’s eye: the artist who sees the whole picture. He sees the drowning Icarus as well as the ploughman, and all the others. He can paint everything. Maybe I see myself as Breugel in this film, modest as I am; I can see all the small struggles and even put them on display.

I just recalled the part of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde where he describes that the failure to merge art and life, an essential concern for avant-garde artists, lies in its framing as art. By creating this film, you somehow managed to bridge this failure: Damla failed to do the artwork in the way she wanted because an idealistic conception of how art can affect the real lies behind it. But by creating a narration that displays her failure, it suddenly becomes possible to show the work. Maybe this is a conflict that political art, working in a more straightforward sense, cannot deal with?

That’s great, I’ll take that with me. I would never do an art project like Damla’s, I think it’s problematic in so many ways. Not only her project, which after all doesn´t exist, but all these projects trying to bring beggars into the gallery or whatever. I feel that we have to deal with it in other and more complex ways.

After this film, how do you perceive the alleged inclusiveness of the art sector that is perpetuated everywhere? Did it change your view on privilege within the art world, or on the possibilities of working with marginalized groups and the openness towards them that art institutions claim?

It’s a difficult position to be an artist: you know, you’re in the wrong class and in the wrong system. The natural conclusion should be to do something else because you don’t reach out to the people you should reach out to. At the same time, I feel that art is still important. I try to see art not as this narrow contemporary fine art field, but more as ‘the arts’: there is music, there are films, there is theater, there are even lullabies and cave paintings, art that has been an integral part of all human societies. So even if my art belongs to this narrow field, it is still a contribution to the great system of human expression which I think is crucial, which we cannot live without. Every artist is a specific person with his or her voice who can only express what she or he knows, and then someone else can express something else. There should just be so many voices. So, the real problem boils down to representation: whose voices are heard? But that is the problem of inequality in general: the world is unequal and the art world reflects this inequality, of course.

How would you describe your own situation after working on the project? Did it change your perception of your own work? Did it affect your own way of working?

There were many aesthetic questions that have become important: for example, how to involve actors, or not really actors, but people who are playing themselves more or less, students, teachers, beggars. That was an interesting experience, people playing well when they ‘play themselves’. To me it is more difficult to work with professional actors now.
And then there is this whole conflict between Damla’s and Johan (the painter)´s approach to artistic practice. It was important for me to state those two positions without becoming a moralist: I can understand both of them. I realized that I do not necessarily have to choose a position or take a stand. That was useful.
The whole environment of the art school has been very important for me. I have recently explored European art schools and how they have changed over the last ten years, through a new film and through writing. So many art schools seem to have moved into new buildings with a completely corporate, neoliberal architecture. And I think these questions of what can happen in the art school and how architecture contributes to artistic creation were carried over from Time Passes.

Director / Producer / Editing: Borjana Ventzislavova
With: Songül Boyraz, Renée Gadsden, Esra Emine Demir, Maruša Sagadin, Claudia Slanar
Camera: Hannes Böck
Sound: Kai-Maier Rothe
Text: Ovid Pop
Voice over: Susanne Schuda
Produced in the frame of: Exiled Gaze / Der exilierte Blick

16 min.
German with English subtitles

“Must remain alert / do not waive / behind the façade / behind the walls / the class coalesces like quicksilver / Must remain alert / heal it with our hair / this diseased spot / this liability to domination, / this unconditional claim laid on the other, / as if the other were not our prop in the distance”

This text is neither a narration nor an explanation of the events in the film; rather, they are the words Ovid Pop created for the film, framed to make poetic claims and pose questions. But what exactly should not be “waived” here?

The work presents places related to Austrian history and politics, to current political life as well as historically significant places along the Wiener Ring that were part of Hitler's ‘triumphal march’ in 1938; or the balcony of the Hofburg, which since that year has been inextricably linked with the speech on the occasion of the annexation of Austria to the German Reich and which is decontaminated at the end of the film by Esra Emine Demir's performative action. Other locations are places in Vienna’s second and third district, where Jews were publicly humiliated during National Socialism.

However, Vienna is only an example of many cities, regions, and countries worldwide where suppressed history and current right-wing tendencies are present and overlapping.

In the film And the Sky Clears Up (MAGIC RESISTANCE), five women appear as protagonists, each of them performing an artistic ritual in historically burdened places in order to deal with the 'ghosts of the past' as well as to purge them of the current, right-wing populist political events. Borjana Ventzislavova’s collaboration turned out to be very different with each of the performers —some carried out precise instructions given by the filmmaker, others brought their own performances and further developed them in relation to given tools and objects that they interacted with spontaneously.

This gradual, sometimes very intuitive form of participation and cooperation is expressed in the very distinct rituals that stand out as quiet, sometimes tender, ephemeral interventions, in contrast to the monumental squares and buildings, or the mighty Danube itself. The performances refer in part to voodoo practices and traditions of indigenous cultures. Borjana Ventzislavova translates these, as well as customs she is familiar with from her childhood in Bulgaria, into her own artistic language and transforms them into new, universal actions.
Depicting this artistic connection, the film contrasts the existing representation of culture and statehood within a culturally diverse, open, feminine, and lively sphere in which magic, ritual, and superstition become techniques to rebel against rationalistic superiority. Since there has been a shift away from the ideal of making reasonable decisions for the good of all, suddenly older forms of knowledge can once again take up their battle against it and on par with it.

“Remain alert”, “healing”; the possibilities presented by And the Sky Clears Up (MAGIC RESISTANCE)  seem absurd to the viewer at first —and yet rituals can make a difference: while her work was being shown at the Salzburger Kunstverein, the Austrian government resigned due to the Ibiza scandal, the artist explains with a wink.

Production / Direction / Editing / Screenplay: Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze
With: Nugzar Gagoshidze
Music: John Adams, Arseny Avraamov, Iliko Gogiberishvili, Tim Hecker, Giorgi Koberidze, and Mark Pritchard
Sound: Giorgi Koberidze

Research supported by Berlin Senate Department for Culture

24 min.
English and Georgian with English subtitles

The Real Office in Conversation with Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze

The film explicitly deals with your father’s fate and an event that shaped his life. How was the process of scripting and making the film, and could you tell us more about the conversations with your father? Did your father's perspective on his situation change after the film?

Even though the work explicitly deals with my father’s fate, it is not a documentary film about my father but rather, it tries to zoom out from his personal experiences in order to comment on global geopolitical changes that directly or indirectly shaped his social and physical body. During the production of the film, I tried to employ different visual and linguistic methods to keep a vital distance from my father, in order to avoid making a sentimentally loaded film that does not offer anything else but the exploitation of his personal trauma. 
Although he fully supported and unconditionally participated in the interviewing and filming process, he did not want to watch the final version of the film. And I think I can relate to that. 

The different perspectives of your work —close-up, drone views, renderings— refer to different layers of the story. Could you explain the choice of different techniques and how they relate to the narrative?

The narrative part of the film is constructed from different perspectives of the three main characters in the movie: Nugzari (my father), who tells the story of his personal life, the invisible (lost) hand of my father, which ‘spasms out’ its perspective on my father’s current state, and myself, who appropriates and reshapes the story as my own narration to use it as a commentary in the form of a voice-over. Different forms of CGI, drone footage, and camera lens-based images are related to these characters. 
For instance, for me it was important to find a method to deal with the challenge of giving a visible body to something like the invisible hand, which I claim in the film functions in an obscure way —away from our sight. In this case, I thought digitally modelling its image would make sense since it was supposed to function as a symbol of something that the human eye cannot see and the camera lens cannot capture. 
Furthermore, the drone footage could be perceived as the view of the floating hand which opens up the movie as it spirals up from prosthesis to the CGI hand. The film ends with a drone view of my father reaching out to take it down. This action turns it into a simple means of image production. 

Your father's hand turns into a symbolic figure within your narration. What is the most important aspect or meaning for you?

At the symbolic level, my father’s body functions as a map on which one can trace the changes of political ideologies of the last few decades. He lived through two different political and economic systems, from socialism, which is characterised by a clenched ‘worker's fist’, to the liberal economy, which is represented by “the invisible hand of the free market″. The film is an attempt at tracing the invisible hand that my father lost as a migrant worker in Portugal, during the financial crisis in 2008. By contextualising and examining them I tried to comprehend the governing logic of ‘his invisible hand’, which creates a new form of labour for him and regulates the economy of his family.
At a certain moment in the film, through the abandoned prosthesis, his lost hand finds a way to stress that even though we cannot see it, we still cannot deny the effects that its 'nonexistence' brought upon him and his family. For me, it is very important when his lost hand finds its voice in the film and establishes a dimension of invisible labour. A labour that does exist, contributing so much to society, yet still remaining invisible. 

By narrating this story, do you think it might help disentangle the complex dependencies individuals face?

For me, composing a body of work serves to construct a kind of prism, equipped with certain parameters that helps to interpret and analyse the steps and traces of an invisible set of economic and political conditions that shape a subject. 
The observation of ‘insignificant’ and ‘ordinary’ events through that prism should open up ways that enable the story to be exposed in relation to larger social and political contexts. At least, that is what I tried with The Invisible Hand of my Father.