Lovely Andrea, 2007, DVD 30min
Steyerl searches for a bondage picture in Tokyo taken 20 years ago
November, 2004, DVD 25min. engl.
“An age that has lost its gestures is, for this reason, obsessed by them. For human beings who have lost every sense of naturalness, each single gesture becomes a destiny. And the more gestures lose their ease under the action of invisible powers, the more life becomes indecipherable”. (Agamben 2000:53)
My best friend when I was 17, was a girl called Andrea Wolf. She died in 1998, when she was shot as a Kurdish terrorist in Eastern Anatolia. There was a warrant out for her in Germany, as she was suspected of having participated in terrorist activities, for example the complete destruction of the deportation prison in Weiterstadt. She was also suspected of having been an associate to the Red Army Faction.
In 1996, she chose to go to Kurdistan in order to join the womens army of the PKK, the Workers Party Kurdistan. She took on the name „Ronahi“, trained and lived with the womens army for a few months, mostly in camps in Northern Iraq. Then in October 1998, her unit was tracked by the Turkish army close to the border. A heavy firefight took place. Only a few of the units members remained alive. They were under heavy fire by Army helicopters. Most of the survivors took refuge in what is being described as an earth hole. As surviving earwitnesses who remained in the hole say, she was shot by either army members or Kurdish village keepers after having been dragged out as a prisoner. Her case is only one of the many extralegal executions which structure this war.
“Gesture is the name of this intersection between life and art, act and power, general and particular, text and execution. It is a moment of life subtracted from the context of individual biography as well as the moment of art subtracted from the neutrality of aesthetics: it is pure praxis.” (Agamben 2000:79)
This project tackles the question of what is nowadays called terrorism and used to be called internationalism once. It deals with the gestures and postures it can create, and their relationship to figures of popular culture, namely cinema. It ́s point of departure is a feminist martial arts film Andrea Wolf and I made together when we were 17 years old. Now this fictional martial arts flic has suddenly become a document. November is not a documentary about Andrea Wolf. It is not a film about the situation in Kurdistan. It deals with the gestures of liberation after the end of history, as reflected through popular culture and travelling images. This project is a film about the era of November, when revolution seems to be over and only it ́s gestures keep circulating.
Agamben, G (2000) 'Notes on Politics' Means Without End: (Theory Out of Bounds, V. 20), trans Binetti, V & Casarino, C University of Minnesota Press
http://ubu.com/film/steyerl_november.html
The Empty Centre 1998, 16mm, 62min, color
Potsdamer Platz is a square in the centre of Berlin, Germany.
Before WWII, it used to be the centre of the city, the centre of it ́s power. Then it became an deadly minefield, enclosed between the borders of the Cold War. In 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down. The area between the walls, the empty margins of the border, is open. Now, the centre returns.
After German reunification, Potsdam Square is rebuilt by transnational companies. In the same process, people are shoved out to the outskirts of the city. They are marginalized by the recentering of Germany ́s political and economic power. "The Empty Center" closely follows the processes of urban restructuring that have taken place in the center of Berlin for the last eight years. In 1990, squatters proclaim a socialist republic on the death strip. Eight years later, the new headquarters of Mercedes Benz arise in the same location.
The film makes use of slow superimpositions to uncover the architectonic and political changes of the last eight years. It focusses on Potsdam square to discover traces of global power shifts, and the simultaneous dismantling and reconstruction of borders.
At the same time, it traces back the history of ostracism and exclusion, especially against immigrants and minorities, which always have served to define the notion of a powerful national center. After the recent German elections, a new chancellor boasts to represent the "New Center" of public opinion. The film nevertheless strives to highlight the perspective of those who are still excluded from public representation and to give them a voice and a history. "It is not so much crossing boundaries as frontiers as it is the partial disappearance, dissolution or repositioning of the boundaries themselves. It is the shifting of the boundaries as you try to cross them... Now you begin to see that we are also talking about the fragmentation of boundaries; the partial breakdown, renegotiation, repositioning of boundaries, about the appearance of new boundaries which cut across the old ones." Stuart Hall
http://ubu.com/film/steyerl_empty.html
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