Each year the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art offers a Summer School. For three days participants engage with a topic located at the interface of theory and practice. This year under the title “FILM AS POLITICAL PRACTICE: Production, Presentation, and Participation” they discuss the question: How can the medium of film make room for social discourse and political action in the cinema and in exhibition spaces?

The program will feature a talk and work by alumna Clarissa Thieme titled "Can't You See Them?" – The Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Archive Sarajevo – Artistic Strategies with and Collaborations Resulting from Subjective Testimony.
Thieme has developed several artistic interventions over the last few years based on her intense engagement with the Library Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Archive, a private collection of amateur videos, in which the inhabitants of Sarajevo documented their lives during the siege (1992 - 1996). She has been looking into whether making visible the subjectivity of the videos can be a possible strategy to critically oppose dominant discourses of objectifying history with the complexity of a polyphone of memories. To this end she not only puts the testimonies deriving from the archive into dialogue with the present, but incorporates the same people who shot the material into her artistic process, adding a further temporal dimension of subjective testimony to their archival material some 25 years later.

When? Where?
23 August 2019, 1- 2.30pm
silent green Kulturquartier
Gerichtstr. 35
13347 Berlin

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