before the beginning

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,ddɘ ɘʜƚ ɘɿɒ ɘw ,wo|Ꮈ ɘʜƚ ɘɿɒ ɘW"
".dɘw ɘʜƚ ɘɿɒ ɘw ,ꙅɿɘvɒɘw ɘʜƚ ɘɿɒ ɘW – Shekhinah Mountainwater
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Expanding on the notion of non-linear narrative, this film program explores the transgressive potential of spirographic time within the storytelling process. In order to resist the imperialism of single voice history, the artists are employing looping, flashbacks and forwards, multiple timelines, and cacophony of voices to convey their individual research. Giving a voice to “invisible” agents – marginalised, oppressed, repressed, unseen, forgotten, and/or imaginary, they are excavating the buried histories of violence and deep-time trauma, and transforming them into a surrealistic set of tools to revitalise our shared reality.

With: Johanna Breiding and Shoghig Halajian, The Commons (Mireya Lucio & Sallie Merkel), Vika Kirchenbauer, Ben Russel, and Antoinette Zwirchmayr.
photo © Antoinette Zwirchmayr, The Shadow of Utopia, 2017, (filmstill)

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Program:
Johanna Breiding and Shoghig Halajian, The Rebel Body, 29:43min, (2019)
The Rebel Body follows the murder of Anna Göldi (1782), the last person to be executed for witchcraft in Europe, and tracks her final route through Glarus, Switzerland.

Vika Kirchenbauer, Untitled Sequence of Gaps, 12:31min, (2020)

Composed of short vignettes in different techniques and materialities, Untitled Sequence of Gaps uses the form of an essay film to approach trauma-related memory loss via reflections on light outside the visible spectrum – on what is felt but never seen.

The Commons, S2 Ep2: Dissolution, 09:05min, (2019)
The Commons, is a public access morning show serving a modern-day community of witches.

In S2 Ep2: Dissolution Historia & Corinna find their flow in the Bound World with the help of some mysterious characters…

Ben Russel, Atlantis, 23:33min, (2014)

Loosely framed by Plato’s invocation to the lost continent of Atlantis and its re-re-resurrection via a science fiction pulp novel, Atlantis is a documentary portrait of Utopia – an island that has never / forever existed beneath our too-mortal feet.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr, The Shadow of Utopia, 23:00, (2017)

The Shadow of Utopia is the final instalment of a trilogy by the filmmaker, in which the memories of three generations of women form the axis of the narrative. What role does the father play, or Brazil, or sensuality and the body?

(length of the program approx. 90min with program notes by Vanja Smiljanć & Frank-Thorsten Moll)