September 2010 “Über Pornoisierung, Porno Pop und Post Porn, Löcher und Schnitte. Ein Gespräch. Christiane König, Claudia Reiche, Tim Stüttgen.” In: Jörg Metelmann (Hrsg.): PornoPop: Sex in der Oberflächenwelt. Würzburg, 2., überarbeitete Auflage 2010 (im Druck)
2010 Crossroads - Cultural Studies Conference Hong Kong, 16.-21. Juni 2010
Vortrag: “Global Images - Local Politics? Tensions Between Apartheid and Post-Apartheid Politics in a Pop Cultural, Genre-Killing Artefact: Neill Blokamp’s District 9“
April 2010 “Lost- Verloren? Einige Bemerkungen über das Verhältnis zu Objekten.” Beitrag zu The Institute of Lost Research. Hg. v. Minus 1/Experimentallabor@khm. SITE Magazine 1 (April 2010) (in Vorbereitung).
Das Projekt THE INSTITUTE OF LOST RESEARCH beschäftigt sich grundsätzlich mit dem Thema Verloren im Feld der Kunst. Verloren gegangene, wieder gefundene oder archivbezogene Arbeiten sind genauso gefragt wie Arbeiten, die sich grundlegend mit Verlorenem auseinandersetzen. Das Thema kann auch als Spannung zwischen Original und Reproduktion sowie zwischen Verfall und Rekonstruktion oder Restauration gelesen, aber auch vollkommen frei verstanden werden.
März 2010 Gleichnamiger Text zur experimentellen Filmcollage A Rock Hudson Dialogue (2010) von Jens Pecho im Rahmen von enovos - Der Preis Junge Kunst 2010. Katalog zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung in Vorbereitung.
American Film History – Histories of North-American Cinema and Film
Is cinema evolving? Does it have a coherent, linear development? Are filmic images just a mere reflection of a so called “reality”? Certainly none of that.
What, respectively, do we want to know about a medium, its characteristics, its modes of aesthetic style, its narrative power, its semantic values regarding its chances over time (nearly 130 years by this time)? If we ever agree in saying that film is a powerful cultural technology then we deal with cinema as dispositif. If we are tracking this, the whole realm of economic, socio-cultural and socio-political conditions in all their muddeled connections opens up to our understanding of film as historical medium. The dispositif, as decisively written by Michel Foucault, within a given society, is a set of strategies, composed to react to a critical situation. So, rather, to find smooth and seamless transitions and nice affiliations, we come across clashes, ruptures, deviances, but also lines of flight (in Deleuzian terms) in the history of American cinema and film.
Correspondingly, the course does not aim at neither giving a comprehensive overview or clear notions of eras, genres, or any other “categories” of US-Cinema. Rather, the concept makes cuts and leaps to take into account those strands of the history of American Cinema, that matter – in the sense that subjects, bodies, race, class and gender matter. Such matters could be for instance: the first little clumsy moving pictures that came out of Edisons Black Maria and were distributed in Nickelodeon theatres to please a newly formed mass audience, the cinema of the Progressive Era, dealing with their social problem, the rising of sound in film, that connected space, body and voice differently than ever before on screen, Hays-Code pre-productions, Atomic Bomb and Scientific Revolution films of the Cold War Era, Melodrama as “feminine” filmgenre in the Nixon ear, Underground Cinema, Expanded Cinema, and Blaxploitation of the 1960ies and early 1970ies, New Queer Cinema of the 1990ies, Digital Cinema in the age of globalisms and turbocapitalism.
Januar 2010
In “You are not welcome here”. Of post-apartheid negrophobia, and real aliens in Blomkamp’s District 9 (gemeinsam mit Henriette Gunkel). In: darkmatter. in the ruins of imperial culture, No. 6, January/February 2010 erläutern wir, warum District 9 eine aussergewöhnliche, aufrichtige Kritik an der postkolonialen Gesellschaft Südafrikas darstellt. Dies aber zum hohen Preis, insbesondere Afrikaner aus anderen afrikanischen Staaten (Nigerianer) als blinden Fleck zu behandeln. Wir demonstrieren zudem, dass D9, der von den einen als grandioser Vertreter des New African Cinema interpretiert, von anderen als “just another racist movie” abqualifiziert wird, gerade deshalb weltweit so erfolgreich ist, weil er Dichotomien wie “real” - “fiktiv”, “dokumentarisch” - “fiktional”, Identität-Differenz konstruktiv aufbricht und sich zudem keinem Genre eindeutig zuordnen lässt.
When District 9 (D9) was released in August 2009, the film was an immediate box office hit in several countries. This was much to the surprise of critics, reviewers and bloggers, who seemed astonished by the fact that a science fiction film with this impact could originate from South Africa. Internet forum discussions and an E-Symposium emerged as a response to the film, which continues to be the subject of controversial discussion. While many celebrate the film in relation to the ‘generic’ genre of Science Fiction as a promising representative of a thriving African Cinema, others reject the film on the basis of its socio-political message, as yet another racist movie about Africa – with reference to the depiction of both ‘the Nigerians’ and the aliens. In this article, we would like to move beyond a crudely metaphorical reading of representation (‘the aliens stand for X in reality’), and explore the degree to which the film foregrounds its own mediality. This focus moves us beyond a polarizing position that immediately rejects the film as racist, and allows us to engage with a complex and original text unlike so many other films that take ‘Africa’ as their subject.
21. November 2009 Einladungstext für die Ausstellung von Timo Sebers Arbeiten mit dem Titel “I’m that Chick” in der Galerie Schmidt und Handrup in Köln. Die Eröffnung findet am Freitag, den 21. November, ab 19 Uhr statt. Ort: Aachener Strasse 23, 50674 Köln.
2009 In der experimentellen Dokumentation Kapitan Andreevo. Geschichte einer Flucht (2008) von Antje Dombrowsky und Jörg Metelmann wird eine Republikflucht aus der DDR über den bulgarischen Grenzpunkt Andreevo in den 1960er Jahren thematisiert. Die Geschichte wird dabei durch die Reise nach Andreevo mit den Mitteln des Interviews, aktuellem und historischem Filmmaterial, Tagebucheintragungen, Momentfotografien und Privataufnahmen re-konstruiert. www.kapitan-andreevo.de