Opening, October 12, 2005, 4 pm
Exhibition, October 13 – 26, 2005
A Visit to Themroc draws parallels between the living situations of two “workers” by means of a kind of confrontation between the two men. One sequence is cut from the abstracted scenes of the film Themroc by Claude Faraldo (F, 1973), in which a house painter (Michel Piccoli) leaves the working world behind him in an anarchic luddite mood and walls himself into his depressing concrete flat. The other sequence consists of new footage. These staged scenes constitute a description of the state of working society in the 21st century. Shot in a planned city—built expressly for a population of workers—the video footage shows a society which has lost the working structure it has always known. The video “stories” relate to the film scenes or comment on them. Then the protagonists’ paths cross for a brief moment. Schweiger’s film investigates the changing meaning of work and its influence on urban developments. It juxtaposes the positive utopian mood of the end of working society at the end of the 1970s with the contemporary problem of unemployment and the resulting situation for individual and collective identity.
Michaela Schweiger (b. 1966 in Germany) lives and works in Berlin.
www.michaelaschweiger.de
Curated by Christian Kravagna and Hedwig Saxenhuber.
