Cologne. »Institutionalisation« is the perpetuation of social routines even though their reason or purpose no longer forms part of our living knowledge and even though we are not able to vary how they are executed as we wish. The spaces dealt with in Berlin artist and filmmaker Clemens von Wedemeyer’s films are institutionalised spaces in this sense: patterns of social configurations, in which the players appear to be placed without any alternatives and in which a limited set of possible movements, events and actions is already traced out – potential resistances and deviations are already factored in. Wedemeyer’s productions become intellectually attractive due to the way the various regulatory patterns of the social spaces on which he turns his gaze are reproduced as filmic constructions, making real places and situations, architectures and people behave like models of themselves in these films. Whether it is an East German housing estate, a visa division, a museum or a prison, together with the subjects contained in each setting, Wedemeyer does not actually depict these – for example in a documentary style - but instead simulates them in the experiential space of the cinema, dislocating a few degrees in the theatrical order of cinematic language. By fictionalising them, he turns the relationships he thus addresses - and at the same time also potential critical representation of these relationships – into a performance as contingent constructs. In the dovetailing of real institutional space and cinematographic projection of this space, these constructs appear determined and at the same time random, unnecessary. That makes Wedemeyer’s films gripping, turns them into tableaux of social attributions, which could also unfold differently.
In his first larger solo exhibition in Germany, Clemens von Wedemeyer is now showing a selection of film projects from the last few years, in conjunction with the outgoing director of the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Kathrin Rhomberg. Prior to this the programmatic 35mm short »Occupation« (2002), screened in the Kunstverein film theatre, formulated the cinema as a subject, as a historical framework of reference, as a regulatory apparatus for the production of social circumstances and as a sphere of action for an interventionist artistic practice focused on this pictorial space: a crowd of extras is crammed together at night in an open field by the authoritarian system of a film team trying to shoot a crowd scene. The wheels of the production machinery start to turn, all the actors give exemplary performances; only the purpose and the point of the whole configuration seems unknown. Cinema celebrates itself in its absurd redundancy as emphatic productivity to no end, as if it were founded on a secret immanence. As a filmmaker, Wedemeyer speaks from inside the workings of this system; his own cinematic language is a spectacle in and of itself, cites visual dramaturgical stereotypes and demonstrates in the process how these are used. The lesson distilled from many discourses: anyone who wants to reflect on the spectacle of film has to make films.
Clemens and Berlin-based architect Henning von Wedemeyer slotted two cool, matter-of-fact projection rooms into the Kunstverein exhibition space, incorporating an intermediate room between them. »Otjesd« – produced for the Moscow Biennale 2005 – represents a project that could link in with Kathrin Rhomberg’s previous exhibitions on the topic of migration. A queue of people keen to leave the country waits outside the German consulate’s visa department in Moscow. A service economy tailor-made to meet their needs develops around them. Wedemeyer re-enacted this situation with Russian migrants – and thus disclosed it as a model - on an abandoned plot of land in Berlin. Passport control, security checks and a mafia car all make an appearance, but the unedited, 15-minute tracking shot through the waiting figures is closed to form a loop, the desire to emigrate becomes an endless loop. Stylistically the film is reminiscent of Tarkovsky; for his part the »most Russian« representative of Russian cinema left the country in 1983.
In the second projection room the loop »Silberhöhe«, shown inter alia in 2004 in the »shrinking cities« exhibition, is displayed. Here Wedemeyer adopts the camera perspective that Antonioni used to film the construction of the modern city in 1962 in Italy (»L’eclisse«), and turns it on the demolition of the Halle housing estate »Silberhöhe«, thus drawing a conceptual line from the genesis to the destruction of an urban utopia that has now fallen into disrepute. Similarly to the approach in »Occupation« and »Otjesd«, here again the sequence of events seems to follow inner rules devoid of any reason or necessity.
The intermediate space, placed between these two films as an architectonic caesura and a break in the flow of the argumentation, revealed a view of the urban surroundings of downtown Cologne and formed a counter-image at the centre of the exhibition to the staged surfaces of the film projections, along with the monitor presentations of making-ofs, publications about Wedemeyer’s films and a video study on the revamping of an East German suburban estate - a reflective twist of the kind Wedemeyer often inscribes in his projects, thus giving a »counter-reading« of cinematic language, linking it back to the real space of society and framing it within the conditions of its production.
Translated by Helen Ferguson