Anna Lauenstein & Leon Vatter
FILMS, ARCHIVES & IMAGINATIONS. Filmic Research in Collaboration
Seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Wednesday, 14-16h, weekly, starting 19.4.2023, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 004

Registration on Moodle starts on the 17th of April / Anmeldung auf Moodle beginnt am 17.4.2023: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=1854
Moodle Enrollment Key / Einschreibeschlüssel: filming

What are filmic approaches to archives? How can artistic research recover counter-narratives and non-imperial imaginations instead of hegemonic narratives? How can archives be decolonized? What is multi-directional remembering and how does it take form? And how can archives and film discover imaginations of possible futures?
We will look closely at existing filmic works and develop our own filmic research, possibly in collaboration.

In the first half of the seminar, we will watch and discuss filmic and artistic approaches which work with archives. We will closely watch films by Ângela Ferreira, Laura Horelli and Philip Scheffner, among others, and learn about their artistic methods and strategies. A focus here will be on the entanglements of (post)socialist and decolonial histories. After that we will read and discuss about archives and imaginations (Arjun Appadurai), multi-directional remembering (Michael Rothberg) and the perspective of entanglements (Shalini Randeria).

In the second half of the seminar we will develop our own filmic research. You can start a new work, continue an already existing research, find collaborators for it or contribute to a project with your expertise. You can work with an archive of your choice. An archive can be an institution, but it could also be a monument, a place or a landscape. It could be a private archive or one that you would just begin to assemble yourself. In the process we will consider above all the question of the form of one's own artistic research. What constitutes one's own artistic practice?

The medium of film is particularly suitable for collaborations because many different disciplines can work together in a form that unites them. It is important to negotiate and decide in which constellation of roles and tasks cooperation can succeed. The facilitators of this format will accompany and support the whole process with feedback talks in the seminar and individually. In a small workshop you will be able to learn some technical basics of filming. Finally, we will watch the newly developed works together and give each other feedback. There is a possibility of organizing a screening or an exhibition together at the end of the semester to show the films or sketches there.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credits: Miniature of one’s own filmic research or contribution to a collaborative filmic sketch

Anna Lauenstein studied Fine Arts with a focus on the moving image at the University of the Arts (Berlin) with Prof. Jimmy Robert, Prof. Ming Wong and Prof. Hito Steyerl. She also studied Cultural Anthropology at the Humboldt University (Berlin) and the University of Leipzig. Since August 2020 she is working at Studium Generale as an artistic and scientific assistant. In her artistic and filmic research she works within the tensions between knowledge, poetics and politics, whereby a decolonial perspective on Europe is central. Her works have been shown e. g. at HAUNT, Berlin; Galerie Bernau; the Museum of Photography, Berlin and the BWA Gallery, Wrocław. She was nominated for the President's Fine Arts Award of UdK and she was awarded the NaFöG fellowship 2021/22.

Leon Vatter studied philosophy and political sciences at Freie Universität Berlin and Universitá di Urbino. Since October 2019, he has been working as a research assistant in the Studium Generale team at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where he regularly teaches seminars in both cultural studies and interdisciplinary arts. His areas of work are in political philosophy, feminist philosophy of science and futurology. He is working on his thesis at Prof. Karin Harrasser’s department at the Kunstuniversität Linz. In addition to teaching and researching, he is active in the DAAD-funded Integra project Beyond UdK, founded in 2020.