Gertrude Moser-Wagner: Concept & Coincidence (INDEX 013)

| Tyran Grillo

Gertrude Moser-Wagner may be known primarily as a sculptor, yet her videos reveal an artist who treats moving images as material phenomena rather than narrative devices. Her formula of “concept and coincidence” is not merely a method but a worldview. Concept is the structure she brings to a site. Coincidence is what the site returns. Her films emerge from the friction between intention and accident, between the framework and the world that slips through its seams. Out of that friction rises the “spark” she often speaks of: the moment when place, sound, body, and camera discover a shared frequency, and experience begins to vibrate in multiple layers at once.

Although her practice ranges across sculpture, installation, performance, and collaborative happenings, her videographic creations remain deeply tactile in their orientation. She treats image as substance, sound as atmospheric pressure, and location as something that must be excavated. Each frame feels unearthed rather than staged, a found object transformed through the conditions of its encounter. This timely DVD, which collects works made between 1987 and 2000, serves as a kind of field notebook, a record of embodied perception. These films do not illustrate ideas but reveal how ideas collide with the textures of real spaces.

The first of these encounters, Lingual (1992), opens with a startling gesture of intimacy: a calf sucking on a human hand. Instead of barnyard ambience, organ pipes fill the air, lifting a primal act into ritual space. Josef Reiter’s sound design turns ingestion into ceremony. The film becomes an exploration of how the world is taken in long before it is spoken. Moser-Wagner compresses the image into narrow, constricted views and then releases it into the full frame, creating pulses of tightening and release. The effect is haunting in its simplicity, suggesting that language begins as touch and that meaning, before it can be articulated, must first be felt.

That sensitivity to spatial breath intensifies in Kiosk (1993), filmed in Skoki, Poland, inside a villa whose architecture seems to fold in on itself. The title is an anagram of the town’s name, as though the building had been scrambled into a linguistic echo. Again, Reiter collaborates on sound, this time evoking the hum of bureaucratic machinery, including ticker tape, typewriter keys, and mechanical exhalations. The imagery, predominantly black and white but punctuated by uncanny bursts of color, transforms the space into an architectural hallucination. Stone windows tilt and stretch, as if the house were confessing its own interior life.

In Luftloch (1987), filmed at St. Lambrecht monastery in Styria, Austria, concept and coincidence intermingle with palpable immediacy. Musicians Andreas Weixler and Se-Lien Chuang generate an aural landscape that interweaves with images of industrial scrap, abandoned buildings, tai chi-esque movements, and bodies echoing through forgotten spaces. The film oscillates between document and spontaneous happening. A communal meal surfaces, then a staircase, then water, then a video of a woman eating fish. Industry seeps into monastic quiet. At one point, glass shatters against concrete; at another, the camera peers through a small aperture onto the street outside, holding interior and exterior together like two lungs sharing a single breath. The entire piece feels sculpted in real time, a performance inscribed into the environment.

Collaboration unfolds differently in Vice Versa / Kraków–Krakau (1998), made with Beverly Piersol. Here, the artists investigate the uncanny linguistic connection between Kraków in Poland and Krakaudorf in Styria. Traveling to both places, they exchanged daily impressions by fax and phone, sending fragments of thought, weather, conversation, and miscommunication. The video is divided into a split-screen dialogue: interviews with a former mayor on one side, drifting landscapes on the other. Faxes, scribbles, and handwritten notes accumulate like sediment across the images. The screen becomes a palimpsest, a layered body of textual and visual residue that foregrounds the limits of naming. Two places share a name but not a destiny. Two artists share impressions but not a home. Language fails even as it connects.

In Ouroboros (2000), Moser-Wagner narrows the gaze on an existential scale. The subject is ROL6, a genetically altered nematode that, once stripped of a particular gene, moves only in circles. Its life becomes a loop without deviation, a literal ouroboros. Andreas Weixler builds a soundscape from Moser-Wagner’s intoned repetition of the title, creating a drone that hypnotizes and unsettles. Under the microscope, the tiny creature turns endlessly, a biological machine fulfilling a script it cannot escape. Yet through Moser-Wagner’s lens, the worm becomes a cosmic figure, a miniature emblem of human existential loops, an organism embodying the tension between agency and determinism.

These films suggest that every act of perception is a negotiation, a delicate interplay between the structural and the spontaneous. Moser-Wagner’s camera collaborates with space rather than controlling it. Meaning arises not from clarity imposed but from fragments, textures, accidents, and atmospheres. The calf’s tongue on a hand, the villa tilting in memory, the monastery breathing through its corridors, the twin cities of Kraków and Krakaudorf speaking across distances, the nematode turning in its microscopic orbit—these are not interruptions but invitations. Each reveals where our conceptual scaffolding falters, letting reality slip in through cracks we did not know existed.

Gustav Deutsch: Film ist. (1-12) (INDEX 012)

| Tyran Grillo

A Cosmology of Light, Motion, and the Memory of the Medium

Where Jean-Luc Godard assembled an archive of quotations and theories in Histoire(s) du cinéma, Gustav Deutsch moves in another direction entirely. He steps back and allows the films to speak in their own native frequencies. In doing so, he returns cinema to an antediluvian state, before the narrative flood. He approaches film not simply as a human invention but as an extension of light itself, something that predates our desire to shape images out of the visible.

Film ist., a lifelong project begun in 1996 and elaborated into the 2004 release, is an ongoing cosmology. Deutsch works as an archaeologist of the medium, excavating scientific reels, laboratory experiments, variety acts, and early spectacles. These fragments form strata through which he reconstructs the primal gestures of motion pictures. Each titled section of Film ist. does not categorize so much as orbit, proposing a constellation of definitions that never settle into consensus.

The film is organized around two birthplaces of cinema. In the first six sections, Deutsch draws on scientific films, in which the medium originally served as a research instrument, breaking the world down into analyzable components. Before the camera told stories, it slowed phenomena, magnified details, and captured movements too fleeting for the naked eye. The second six sections turn toward fairgrounds and variety theaters, the carnival of images that gave film its first audiences.

These two lineages intersect throughout Film ist., not as opposites but as twin strands of the same evolutionary pulse. Inquiry and fantasy are revealed as inseparable aspects of the medium’s DNA. Light observes the world, which performs under its scrutiny. Cinema moves, and so, it moves us. Deutsch constructs not an argument but an ecosystem, an image-world where the medium remembers itself.

The 12 Sections

The journey begins with movement and time, where a sequence of X-ray images reveals the body as an instrument of motion that must be dismantled before it can be understood. Voices of science discuss the nature of film while the camera studies animals and humans alike. Muscle, bone, and gesture become data, delicate and ghostly under the looming field of observation. Movement emerges not as entertainment but as a key to life itself. Watching these fragments, one senses film undoing us by scrutinizing everything to which we are tethered.

light and darkness follow as twin forces shaping the earliest cinema. Lightning tears open the sky, raw electricity dances across a Tesla coil, a mannequin is sacrificed to demonstrate the impact of force. Here, light behaves without human intention, asserting itself with primordial authority. Insects burn in flames; stars flicker at impossible distances; a lunar eclipse swallows the moon. The images feel cosmic, as if film were watching light watch itself, recognizing its kinship with the vibrating atoms that animate it.

With an instrument, Deutsch turns to the ways sound and science intertwine. Cochlear implants, violinists’ muscle memory, vocal cords vibrating through slow-motion magnification: the body becomes both target and generator of wavelengths. Cymatics reveals patterns etched into matter by sound. Crash tests register the brutal choreography of impact. Vibration emerges as the secret sibling of light, another form of inscription. Film listens, and in so doing, it discovers that every image has an echo.

material draws us into the vulnerability of the medium. Film stock decays, bubbling and cracking before our eyes, returning to its chemical origins. Gelatin, silver, dust: the physicality of celluloid asserts itself, surviving only through a fragile contract with time. The scraps are examined like fossils waiting to be reanimated. In this decay, Deutsch locates a memory stored in deterioration itself.

a blink of an eye returns us to the organ that makes cinema possible. Spirals pulse on its surface while the distant rumble of a train approaches. Soon, we see through the train window, the movement doubled by the blink of the eyelid. REM sleep transforms into internal cinema, reminding us that dreaming preceded filmmaking by millennia. The eye becomes both subject and apparatus, examined by the very technology that expanded its reach.

This leads to a mirror, where self-regard becomes both horror and fascination. Ocular surgery unfolds with clinical detachment, unsettling in its lucidity. An eye is removed and replaced with an artificial one capable of recording. Mirrors proliferate, reflecting back at the camera and at each other, multiplying perspectives beyond human comprehension. A monkey examines its reflection, an evolutionary echo of spectatorship itself. Cinema becomes self-conscious, looking at the act of looking.

comic unsettles the mood with voyeurism laced in discomfort. A man peers through a keyhole at an exoticized world he does not understand. The soundtrack wavers, unable to support the ethical tension of the image. Humor arises, but so does unease. Deutsch exposes the mechanics of amusement while confirming how comedy is uniquely suited to carrying the weight of its cultural assumptions.

Then, in magic, cinema reveals its oldest trick: illusion. Special effects blossom from archival footage; bodies disappear and reappear; objects move of their own accord. In these moments, film seems to remember not only its scientific origins but its mythic ones. The medium has always been a playground for the impossible.

conquest interrupts this enchantment with the starkness of colonial imagery. White explorers stride across foreign landscapes with cameras and rifles alike. Their gaze treats the world as territory to be claimed. The framing itself becomes complicit in the violence, revealing how cinema absorbed imperial fantasies into its earliest modes of representation. Deutsch does not editorialize; he simply arranges the evidence and lets the images accuse themselves.

writing and language turns attention to the skeleton of cinema: intertitles, production slates, scene numbers, and other coded marks that scaffold every film. Logos become a hidden architecture beneath the visible. These fragments reveal the labor of classification and control, the systems that shape meaning before an audience ever encounters it.

emotions and passion brings us into the realm of performance. Faces contort; tears fall; desire and fear register across bodies that the camera never treats neutrally. Women, in particular, bear the burden of cinematic affect, their expressions harnessed to dramatize emotion. Deutsch’s arrangement highlights the gendered patterns in the history of performance and the ways cinema teaches us what feelings should look like.

memory and document closes the cycle. Fire devours reels of film; voyages unfold across seas; home movies flicker with the fragile glow of lives once lived. Such footage carries the warmth of personal history and the coldness of its disappearance. Cinema becomes an archive haunted by its own mortality. Everything recorded asserts preservation in the face of mortality.

Bonus Tracks

In Über. Gustav Deutsch, a portrait of the filmmaker presented without translation, the subject remains partly inscrutable, demonstrating that language is only one lens through which a life may be perceived. Lastly, an installation version of Film ist. [1–12] is shown to surround viewers with a ring of projections, allowing them to stand inside a zoetrope of continuous light. To inhabit this circle is to feel momentarily inside the medium’s inner workings, as if observing cinema dreaming.

When Light Remembers Itself

Across Film ist., Deutsch enacts a simple yet radical intervention: he allows cinema to remember itself not as entertainment or technology but as an elemental phenomenon that unveils the smallest gestures and the largest violences. It perceives what the naked eye cannot register, visualizes what consciousness struggles to accept.

In Deutsch’s cosmology, film is all things at once. It is not bound to the history of its machinery. It reaches further back, toward the first human who watched firelight travel across a cave wall and sensed meaning in the flicker. The fire fades, yet its glow remains.

Perhaps the unspoken thesis of Film ist. is that cinema is not ours to define. It is something we inherit from beyond, a continuum of presence and erasure. Deutsch listens because the films have always been speaking. Only now are we learning to hear them.

Manfred Neuwirth: 間 [ma]Trilogy (INDEX 011)

| Tyran Grillo

Manfred Neuwirth arrived at filmmaking through the pathways of journalism and history, both of which left traces in his later work. The instinct to observe, to contextualize, to listen for what a moment is trying to say—all of this shaped his approach long before he cofounded Medienwerkstatt Wien and began building distinct(ive) cinematic worlds. His films feel archival without becoming documents, poetic without drifting into abstraction, grounded in reality yet loosened from the demands of storytelling. If many filmmakers construct coherent worlds through narrative, Neuwirth positions himself in spaces of duration, fragments, and the patient choreography of looking.

This sensibility took on a crystalline form in three works he made from the late 1980s to the end of the 1990s. Together, they form a loose trilogy of observational meditations. Each is composed of equal-length shots that sink into darkness before another image emerges. Such pacing slows the world until time feels elastic, asking the viewer to find the thread that binds one image to the next, to become witness, traveler, and editor all at once.

In Tibetische Erinnerungen (Tibetan Recollections), made between 1988 and 1995, thirty-five shots create a rhythm that resembles respiration. One scene exhales into blackness, then inhales into a new image. What holds the work together is not continuity but gravity, a quiet pull generated by the tension between the political and the everyday. A jolting prologue shows Chinese soldiers arresting Tibetan monks. This violence reverberates throughout the rest of the film in subtle yet persistent ways. Later, a singer appears on television wearing clothing reminiscent of the soldiers’ uniforms. Thus, Neuwirth’s aesthetic gathers force by refusing to forget what the prologue makes visible.

Much of the film settles into a sensory archive of Tibetan daily life. A man on a motorcycle. Butter tea boiling in a kettle on the street. A beer bottle left on a restaurant table. A water pump at work. A taxi weaving through a city that never quite reveals its full shape. These visuals lapse into a state of drift while the soundtrack remains in real time, a disjuncture that heightens awareness and holds the viewer in a kind of suspended attention. Moments turn to recollections, recollections to emotional geography.

Regarding Japan through the lens of manga train, completed in 1998, the method remains consistent, even if the atmosphere transforms. Thirty equal-length shots fade into one another, slowed to a similar tempo, yet the world here feels unsettled, shimmering with impressions that never quite anchor themselves. Rain gathers on concrete steps. Gambling halls erupt in cacophony. Street festivals pulse with color. Vending machines glow under the rain. Temples, train stations, sumo bouts, conveyor-belt sushi, late-night television: each vignette arrives as though remembered by someone unsure where the memory belongs.

In this gentle ache of dislocation, the soundscape becomes essential: footsteps, scattered conversations, the hum of machines, and rainfall that seems to stitch the transitions together. Recurring shots from train windows form a metaphor for both travel and estrangement. At night, the viewer shares the sensation of being suspended between places. The experience feels less like tourism and more like listening to a world that keeps its secrets close to its beating heart.

Turning to Lower Austria in magic hour in 1999, Neuwirth brings this method to the terrain of his own past. The equal-length shots and slow fades remain, but the tone softens into one of homecoming. He lingers on windows, doorways, and narrow rooms, creating thresholds between interior and exterior spaces that echo his own movement between belonging and observation. Lightning flickers across the countryside. A child dips a foot into a wading pool. Towns glow with sparse night lights. Soccer games unfold on fields marked by long familiarity. Forest paths, local celebrations, snowfall, music, farming, industry: everything is filtered through an intimacy that feels newly discovered.

Darkness becomes its own character. Some scenes lie on the edge of visibility, as the viewer first hears what will later be revealed to the eye. Rain appears again and again, threading like a million needles with its patient fall. If the earlier films bear the solitude of a traveler confronting the unknown, this one offers the stillness of someone returning to a once-familiar landscape with the eyes of another.

A DVD bonus track, Barkhor Round, recorded in Lhasa in 1994, amplifies a core element that runs through the trilogy: Neuwirth’s deep attunement to sound. Created as an audioplay rather than a film, it crystallizes his belief that listening is a way of entering space without possessing it. The footsteps, chants, wind, and commerce of the Barkhor pilgrimage circuit spiral around the listener with such precision that the path becomes tactile. It is a heartfelt attempt to hold the world without claiming it, to dwell within sound and image long enough to feel their inherent dignity.

Across these works, Neuwirth builds not stories but temporal architectures. The equal-length shots grant each moment the same duration and, by extension, the same value. What unites Tibet, Japan, and Lower Austria is not comparison or exoticism but a shared vulnerability. All three reveal themselves as unfinished compositions. Neuwirth avoids explanation, instead inviting the viewer to witness the difficulty of encountering a culture without consuming it.

At a time when social media compresses the human experience with bite-sized certainty, this trilogy allows us to remain in the tension of what is not fully known, without the fear of missing out. To let unfamiliarity teach attention. To look without grasping. To listen without insisting on philosophy.

One leaves these films with no answers, only a heightened attunement. Every culture, every landscape, every fleeting moment carries a luminosity that appears only when the eye is willing to slow down. Neuwirth’s cinema creates the conditions for that retrograde, revealing thresholds that might otherwise be missed. Fragile, shifting, and often radiant, they live on in the spaces left behind, happy enough to avoid our gaze altogether.

Lisl Ponger: Travelling Light (INDEX 010)

| Tyran Grillo

Brigitte Huck describes Lisl Ponger as “an artist for whom discourse is not just another fashionable word but a necessity,” and the claim feels almost modest. For Ponger, discourse is not a frame placed around the work. It is the current running beneath it, the carbon dioxide emerging from its lungs. Her practice understands politics not as subject matter but as a condition of vision itself. She examines the edges of perception, the fugitive traces that cling to bodies and landscapes, and the borders where identity dissolves and reassembles. These liminal spaces form the terrain on which her films ambulate.

Ponger began as a photographer, trained in art school and working in proximity to the Vienna Actionists. She documented the performances of Otto Mühl and Günter Brus when, as Huck observes, “women were the girlfriends, models, and in the worst cases, cool action material.” Yet even here, her camera questioned the dynamic unfolding before it. She was never a passive witness to male extremity but an early investigator of spectatorship, already alert to the power games embedded in the act of looking. Her lens asked: Who sees, and who is seen? Who has the authority to cut an image, and what kinds of harm can that maiming conceal?

That line of inquiry gained new momentum when she picked up a Super 8 camera on a 1974 trip through South America. The shift to film felt less like a change of medium and more like an opening into another temporal dimension. Travel became both a physical journey and a metaphor for crossing narrative thresholds. Movement turned into a form of knowledge. By the 1990s, she had begun to braid documentary practice with found footage, reworking her own archive and that of strangers until new patterns of politics and memory emerged. Through this process, a principle took root: these images resist the softness of nostalgia. They are not claimed as memory. They are constructed from real lives but never mistaken for personal recollection. They insist on remaining critical fictions.

This ethic shapes the drifting, tidal structure of Passagen, her 1996 film on the tourist gaze and the vast migrations of the 20th century. Rather than treating these subjects separately, Ponger reveals how tourism and emigration mirror one another, each defined by a transactional relationship to movement. The film follows journeys traced in circular arcs, almost like the lines of skin folded and refolded across generations. New York rises again and again on the horizon, imagined long before its skyline is ever seen. Those who crossed the ocean remember the hunger of arrival and the wages that barely justified the risk. Ponger avoids the lure of spectacle and instead allows calm narration to float over distant footage. The effect is meditative, yet within this quietude, something electric happens. Children return the gaze of the camera without hesitation. Their unguarded looking complicates the adults’ stories and suggests that migration is not simply a matter of the past. It passes forward, carried in the physiognomy of those who inherit it.

A similar tension shapes déjà vu, completed in 1999, where Ponger shifts toward the archaeological mode that would define so much of her later practice. She finds two abandoned canisters of home movies at a flea market, the filmed life of a married couple whose travels glow with the bright, unconscious arrogance of Western tourism. From these fragments, she builds a sharp and layered critique of exoticization. The film begins in darkness with the sound of a crowd and voices speaking in overlapping languages. Their recollections of travel circle around wonder, sentimentality, and the slippery paternalism that so often surfaces in encounters with cultural difference. These voices settle over images of rituals and landscapes that once thrilled the original filmmakers. Yet again, children appear, looking into the lens with a directness that cuts through the haze of jaded projection. Within this confrontation, Ponger locates the harline cracks of desire, authenticity, and the wish to touch a world without being changed by it.

The gaze shifts once more in Phantom Fremdes Wien, her 2004 ethnographic exploration of Vienna’s hidden pluralities. Filmed between 1991 and 1992, it records gatherings across the city: a Philippine church service, a Swedish festival of light, celebrations that arise wherever diasporic communities stitch a sense of home into unfamiliar streets. Ponger narrates with a measured, observational tone that carries the neutrality of an archive yet feels edged with the intimacy of a journal. Her approach lends the work a dual register. It is less an account of events and more a record of her encounter with them, an unfolding dialogue between seeing and understanding. Here, Vienna reveals itself not as a unified city but as an intricate constellation of worlds, each with its own history of labor, spirituality, and migration. Ponger quietly asks what renders someone “foreign” and who gets to decide.

Across these works, her images demonstrate that no picture is inert. Every frame is charged with the systems that shaped it: economies, colonial histories, gendered roles, the machinery of tourism, the patterns of migration that define our global present. Ponger does not merely portray these structures. She reconfigures them, attentive to the way vision itself is conditioned by power. Even her use of found footage carries an ethical undertow. She does not fold these images into her own life story. She keeps them open to critique, refusing to smooth them into sentiment or personal memory.

What her films reveal is a central paradox of modernity. We are always in motion, traveling across borders, screens, and narratives, yet we rarely understand the histories that make such movement possible. Ponger’s cinema encourages us to feel that complexity and to sense how each act of looking enters into a contract with the visible and the invisible. Looking can be acknowledgment one moment, erasure the next. To travel is to step into layered histories that cannot be consumed without consequence.

Her most radical gesture may be the quietest one. The children who return the gaze do not perform. They do not offer their images for use. They encounter the camera without the filters of ideology or expectation. In those brief exchanges, she suggests a way of seeing that refuses dominance, capable of unlearning what it has been taught and allowing the world to remain foreign without turning it into an object.

In such non-invasive hands, the camera acts as a vessel of ethical attention, moving through passages that have never been static. It listens to the stories carried in those movements and offers them not as trophies but as invitations to witness how the world is continually remade in the friction between looking and being seen.

Constanze Ruhm: Video Works from 1999-2004 (INDEX 009)

| Tyran Grillo

Constanze Ruhm occupies a singular position at the intersection of moving images and digital architecture. Although often described as an installation artist, her video works from 1999 to 2004 reveal an aesthetic shaped less by physical materials and more by the elastic, spectral environments of cinematic memory. She creates new “scripts” for technological gestures, treating pre-existing films not as monuments to be preserved but as material to be metabolized, stripped back, and redirected. These works refuse nostalgia. They distill filmic lucidity into something generative, as if inviting old projections to imagine futures they never had the chance to enter.

Her inquiry begins with travelling – Plan 234 / extérieur nuit (1999), which excises a tracking shot from Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague. In the original, the camera glides past a villa at night, catching brief glimpses of the characters behind its glowing windows. Ruhm isolates that movement and removes its narrative anchor, leaving an “emptied virtual space” where motion persists despite the lack of bodies: a slow-motion slap in the face of voyeurism. The villa becomes a husk. Windows remain open but behold no one, and furniture waits for occupants who never come. Lights extinguish themselves as though performing the rituals of domesticity in memory of those who once operated them. A fragile monument, indeed.

In collaboration with Elisabeth Fiege, Ruhm extends this exploration in ID Remix (1999), which reconstructs virtual spaces inspired by Godard’s La Mépris and Nouvelle Vague and by Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill. Three figures are trapped in a sequence without identity or purpose. They stand in postures that imply intent but yield nothing. Ruhm writes that “a still frame is set into motion,” yet the motion does not release them. The camera circles, but the characters remain mute and isolated, while the purified environments around them seem to reject their very presence. They are ghosts in their own mise-en-scène, expelled until only outlines remain.

Evidence (2000) abandons citations entirely and constructs what the filmmaker calls a “movie without movie,” a plotless topography in which “location as character” serves as the guiding compass. Architectural forms rise from collective memory, fragmented and reassembled into something estranged yet strangely familiar. A deserted snack shack waits for customers. A digital night collapses the idea of depth. Clues appear without crime. The apocalypse here is a vacancy, a terror rooted not in spectacle but in the absence of anyone left to register it. The camera drifts through structures, across hills, and into a barren expanse before ascending into a starless sky. This world has not been destroyed but has simply been abandoned.

A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight (2001), named after a Joyce poem and informed by Freud’s idea of the “screen memory,” is a masterpiece. Spatial echoes from Irving Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura Mars shape the atmosphere, yet nothing feels like reconstruction. Instead, Ruhm builds mnemonic architectures composed of dream residue, cinematic recollection, and digital invention. Melinda May’s voiceover supplies an analytical scaffold as dreamlike colors seep into virtual rooms. The spaces seem haunted not by spirits but by stories still struggling to form. A desert appears as a site of unrendered emotions waiting for memory to give them shape. Time loosens, falling into the rhythms of expectation. Jump cuts beat with the power of a heartbeat. Pans drift with dream logic. Objects exchange places. The piece culminates in a whiteout, a suspended field without boundary. These digital houses hold what has been pushed aside, their corridors echoing with what has been dreamt.

Ruhm’s fascination with afterlives reaches full clarity in X NaNa / Subroutine (2004), in which characters from European and Hollywood films move on after their canonical endings. Nana from Godard’s Vivre sa vie confronts the burden of her filmic past. Offered a job as a hacker, she hesitates, unwilling to reenact the fatal arc she once lived. The video follows several figures: a man watching a film on his computer, a woman beside him eating a sandwich, and another woman working in a record shop wearing a shirt that reads “Mnemosyne” (memory made flesh?). The young man seeks her help in retrieving data tied to Godard’s film. She agrees, reluctantly. Two women meet outdoors, smoke, and exchange something that may be information or simply atmosphere. Nana imagines an alternate ending for Vivre sa vie in which the protagonist survives, but the revision proves unstable. She meets an older man who promises clarity. She encounters the young man again, yet their languages diverge, dissolving any hope of understanding. Communication becomes a shimmering fiction. In the end, she restores her own death to the film, as if accepting the weight of its entropy, and walks away from the computer while a saccharine pop song about “Nana” plays in the background.

Across these works, Ruhm does not dismantle the medium so much as extend its gaze into parallel temporalities. Her videos are not remakes and not critiques. They are liminal spaces where characters, gestures, and plot-like fragments continue to drift long after their source texts have ended. Cinema, in her view, never truly concludes. It decays, recomposes itself, and wanders toward futures it never foresaw. Ruhm asks what becomes of these bodies once their stories fall silent. Do they dissolve into the archive or wander on, displaced and hoping? She suggests that every flicker contains a dormant blueprint for worlds that were never built. She activates these latent structures and places her characters in loops, deserts, empty buildings, voids, and washed-out virtual terrains.

Ruhm’s practice is one of memory as construction rather than recollection, of generation rather than preservation. Once created, cinema never stops creating itself. If we listen carefully, we might hear the faint footsteps of characters exploring the corridors of films that were never shot, searching for a story that can finally accommodate them. Ruhm grants them that possibility, offering spaces where they may linger, falter, return, and attempt once more to live.

Peter Tscherkassky: Films from a Dark Room (INDEX 008)

| Tyran Grillo

“The question of belly or brain is one which Tscherkassky stopped asking long ago—for ultimately sobriety is the route to ecstasy.”
–Gabriele Jutz

Few filmmakers embody the fusion of monastic rigor and hallucinatory sensation more organically than Peter Tscherkassky. Working without a camera, he retreats into the darkroom as if into Plato’s proverbial cave, coaxing each shadow into independence through exposure, burning, scratching, and irradiation. His practice is not only artisanal; it is archaeological. He excavates the unconscious strata of film history and reanimates them, summoning cinema from darkness as though the medium were still being invented frame by trembling frame. “I wanted to unravel and dissolve the medium,” he has said, yet in his hands, dissolution merely gets the distracting skin out of the way. Stripped of illusion, cinema appears as its own flickering skeleton of light.

This revealing impulse emerges vividly in L’Arrivée (1997/98), Tscherkassky’s second homage to the Lumière Brothers. Echoing L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, he compresses the shock of cinema’s founding moment—the train rushing toward the audience, the birth of spectatorship as astonishment—into a capsule of layered arrivals. Rather than pitting past and present against each other, he folds them together so that the medium seems continually on the verge of onset, as if each exposure were a renewed genesis.

Collisions of narrative and its ruptures intensify in Outer Space (1999). Drawing on fragments from a Barbara Hershey horror film (1981’s The Entity), Tscherkassky constructs one of the avant-garde’s most unnerving works, where “the actress reacts to the material, the material doesn’t react to her.” Blackness engulfs the frame, broken only by flares and spots that reveal slivers of a house, a corridor, a woman wandering as though trapped inside the filmstrip itself. Her identity splits and multiplies; she receives premonitions from her own fractured image. The film becomes her tormentor—scratching, overexposing, ripping at her body—until even the soundtrack slips violently off its optical track. When she lashes out toward the screen, it feels like an assault on the viewer, as though she were trying to shatter the membrane between image and spectator. She fades into shadows of shadows, a ghost of the medium that birthed her.

If such is cinema possessed, Dream Work (2001) is its exorcism. Dedicated to Freud and Man Ray, it imposes the twin principles of dream logic—displacement and condensation—until meaning liquefies into pure psychic flux. It begins with a window, the primordial movie screen, glowing through a filter of thought. A sleeping face becomes the projection surface for its own desires, where erotic provocation circulates through clocks ticking with Bergmanesque solemnity. Pleasure and violence blur, images melt and spasm, fantasies collapse under their own convulsive rhythms. Dreams here are not escapes but traps woven from longing.

Tscherkassky’s fascination with cinema’s physical limits is already present in Manufraktur (1985), where found footage becomes the raw material for probing what he calls “a grammar of narrative space.” Scenes of cars racing, pedestrians drifting, and hands blurring in motion conjure the promise of speed and pastoral escape, reinforced by a calm voiceover. Grain overtakes imagery as movement surrenders to the obstinate mechanics of acetate, dissolving back into its fundament.

The impulse to return cinema to its origins is also central to Motion Picture (La Sortie des Ouvriers de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon) (1984), Tscherkassky’s first homage to the Lumières. By reprojecting Workers Leaving the Factory onto fifty strips of unexposed film and assembling them anew, he creates an artifact of light patches, as if memory itself were being visualized in its imperfect state, light beating against matter.

Even in miniature, Tscherkassky cultivates the tension between serenity and rupture. Get Ready, the official trailer for the International Film Festival “Viennale” in 1999, begins with a peaceful seaside moment before being hijacked by traffic, car chases, and melodramatic collisions compressed into a single minute. Stefan Grissemann calls it “a life against the mainstream,” a tiny world where tranquility and chaos coexist in impossible proximity.

The earliest piece in this collection, the bonus track Miniaturen – Viele Berliner Künstler in Hoisdorf (1983), offers a semi-documentary glimpse of Berlin artists introducing avant-garde practices to a small Schleswig-Holstein village. Thomas Kapielski’s manipulated soundtrack anticipates the future logic of DVD commentary before the technology existed. Time folds and voices pass through each other, creating a layered meditation on memory, perception, and the instability of documentary truth.

Across these works, Tscherkassky does not merely experiment with celluloid but excavates its ontology. His films insist that cinema is not a transparent window but a permeable membrane trembling between exposure and erasure. To “unravel and dissolve the medium” is not to kill cinema but to return it to its primal conditions: darkness, light, contact, shock. This is cinema as nerve ending.

Such engagements constitute not the absence of ecstasy but its prerequisite. Only by approaching film with absolute clarity can images vibrate with such metaphysical intensity. In Tscherkassky’s darkroom, we confront the unsettling possibility that in tearing itself apart, cinema leaves us torn in kind. We do not simply watch his films. Through their flicker, we encounter that which can only be understood when it is broken and put back together again.

Volks stöhnende Knochenschau: A Historic Video News Reel Project (INDEX 007)

| Tyran Grillo

Volks stöhnende Knochenschau. A mass spectacle of groaning bones. The title itself is a provocation: the name of a collaborative video project emerging from the inner and outer circles of the Medienwerkstatt Wien (then known as the Verein Medienzentren). These artists understood that media is never a neutral vessel but a contested territory, governed by those who decide what may be seen, said, and remembered. In 1980, Austria had only two publicly operated television stations, ORF 1 and ORF 2. Together they acted as custodians of the public’s permissible concerns, determining not only what would be broadcast but what would be thinkable. Volks stöhnende Knochenschau arose as a revolt against this constricted horizon of visibility and its persistent fiction of objectivity.

The project was conceived not simply as an alternative information outlet but as a practice of “counter-publicity.” Its practitioners sought to expand the very notion of communality by showing what official media suppressed or blurred: stories spoken from below, from the margins, and from bodies left out of state narratives. Their work was broadcast not over television airwaves but through a “video bus” that traveled the countryside during the 1980 Vienna Festival, screening grassroots “newsreels.” Such mobility was symbolic. So long as state media remained anchored in the capital—its authority buttressed by bureaucracy—these videos would have wheels, crossing borders of geography and class to reach viewers rarely permitted to see themselves.

Core contributors Gustav Deutsch, Gerda Lampalzer, Manfred Neuwirth, and Viktor Riemer cultivated a participatory ethos, inviting the public not only to watch but to speak. These works do not merely document; they listen. They reconfigure who is allowed to narrate history. This selection from 1980 offers a panorama of concerns and reveals a landscape in which truth was never static but continually negotiated.

Ungustl Atom (Unsavory Atom, 1980) is an unambiguously charged opinion piece on nuclear power, aligning itself with the November 5th Movement that sought to prevent the activation of Austria’s Zwentendorf nuclear plant on the same date the country famously voted against its operation. The video opens with dramatic, almost Górecki-like music underscoring footage of the plant, lending the structure an eerie grandeur. Street interviews follow, capturing a spectrum of attitudes. Some frame nuclear power as a necessary step toward progress, a technological inevitability. Others shrug: accidents happen everywhere. Still others invoke the Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania, comparing it to The China Syndrome (eerily released just 12 days prior) and questioning whether the media downplayed its consequences. One man touts nuclear energy as a strategy to reduce dependence on foreign oil, while another warns that “technical solutions very often have non-technical consequences.” A final observation laments the erasure of the human factor from media discourse, reflecting growing suspicion that knowledge has become opaque, controlled, and curated. The segment ends with a jarring image of a man dragging what appears to be a woman’s corpse and tossing her onto a heap of radioactive debris. In retrospect, it feels eerily prophetic in a world shaped by Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the slow violence of ecological decay.

Schwul sein kann schön sein! (Being Gay Can Be Beautiful!, 1980) confronts another taboo of its era. Members of the Homosexuellen-Initiative Wien (HOSI) ask passersby a simple question: Would you vote for a homosexual presidential candidate? Answers run the gamut from condemnation to apathy to cautious acceptance. For three weeks, the Vienna Festival hosts an information stand at Reumann Square, becoming a small but vital node of queer visibility. One woman interviewed calmly dismantles essentialist beliefs about gender, beauty, and relationship norms, insisting that all roles are socially constructed. Interviews with gay men foreground fear as a condition forced upon them: “It’s always the secrecy and anxiety that makes people distrustful.” The video reveals not only prejudice but also the psychological defenses it necessitates.

Part street theater, part ritual denunciation, Theatergruppe Collage – Autoanbetung (Car-Worship, 1980) critiques luxury automobiles as objects of modern idolatry. Performers in Satanic robes drag a car down the street, chanting hymns in which “God” becomes “Auto.” The satire is sharp yet sociologically acute: the automobile is not merely a vehicle but a sanctuary for the young, a mobile zone of privacy in an increasingly surveilled society, a new chapel of imagined autonomy.

Burggarten (1980) chronicles the conflict around Vienna’s famous public park, where youth sought free access to its grassy areas for conversation, music, study, relaxation, and open love, only to face resistance from law enforcement. Images of police brutality are intercut with sunlit greenery, starkly contrasting natural desire with the manufactured choreography of authority. Protest grows as violence intensifies, yet few Viennese seem aware of the escalating tension. The video ends without resolution, acknowledging the struggle beyond the frame.

The most intimate piece, Christa erzählt (Christa Recounts, 1980), presents a single shot of Christa, a Vienna prostitute, speaking plainly to the camera. As a child, she was shuttled between homes, her fantasies of stability crushed, before she entered sex work to support her own children. In unabashed testimony, she speaks of her ability to “switch herself off,” to reclaim her identity after work. Moreover, she argues (controversially yet grounded in lived experience) that it is better for men to visit prostitutes than pursue emotional affairs that tear families apart. Filmed without embellishment, her story becomes a mirror held up to a society that depends on the world’s oldest profession even while diavowing its existence in the same idiomatic breath.

Taken together, these works mark a moment in Austrian cultural history when alternative media became urgent, not merely for artistic expression but for the survival of civic consciousness. Volks stöhnende Knochenschau constituted a fragile but vital ecosystem of souls ignored yet essential to democratic life. Its power lies in refusing to polish the world into digestible narratives, instead presenting truth with the grain of experience left intact.

What the collective understood, and what remains true today, is that public reality is constructed through the circulation of images and words. When a state apparatus controls visibility, it tightens its grip not only on information but on the scope of thought. A counter-public, by contrast, expands the realm of the thinkable. It restores opacity to individuals rendered see-through. And so, the most radical gesture of Volks stöhnende Knochenschau is not its critique but its method: the relocation of agency from state institutions to ordinary bodies. The project insists that democracy must be lived from below and through bodies marked by desire, fatigue, refusal, and resilience.

In a media landscape still shaped by consolidation and algorithmic sorting, this archive echoes like a message smuggled from the past. Taken as a whole, it insists that history is not something broadcast from above but something we record, contest, and imagine together, one voice at a time.

Mara Mattuschka: Iris Scan (INDEX 006)

| Tyran Grillo

Mara Mattuschka’s entrance into the world of cinema feels less like a debut and more like a detonation of everything the frame assumes about humanity, language, and the permeable membrane that binds them. Born in 1959 in Sofia, Bulgaria, she uprooted herself at 17 and resettled in Vienna, a city of German syllables at first beyond her command. While acclimating to her new environment, she felt her native words eroding, slipping into an interior exile. What disappeared in speech resurfaced in image, as visual media became the refuge through which she could still articulate her thoughts. She began with short films (“epigrams,” “aphorisms,” and “two-liners”), each a tight blast of vision that compressed poetry into movement. And from the outset, she conjured an alter ego for the screen: Mimi Minus, a persona equal parts mask and reveal.

Gifted mathematically, Mattuschka also studied painting and animation under Maria Lassnig at the University for Applied Arts, where she learned that the flesh could be a medium as honest as pigment. “I use my body as an instrument,” she says. “It is brush, pencil, and thought.” Yet she resists classification as a breaker of taboos, which remain surface-level distractions from the deeper strata where psychological necessity meets material expression. Sex, in her universe, is rarely sex but an assimilation, something closer to action painting than transgression. Her films teem with this notion of “non-verbal understanding,” a physical comprehension of the world that predates and outlives the almighty utterance.

This early philosophy materializes vividly in Nabelfabel (NavelFable, 1984), in which Mattuschka stages a second birth through pairs of tights in what amounts to a ritual and a comedy rolled together into one. Magazine mouths, newspaper masks, notebook-paper credits: all media collapse as she plunges her head into the nylon cocoon and wrestles her way out by means of lips, tongue, and face. Negative images flare; lines are drawn and abandoned. The sound skitters as a distressed record, a creation myth in the form of a self-portrait.

Meanwhile, mischief abounds in Cerolax II (1985), a commercial break from the world’s unconscious, with Mimi Minus hawking a brain-cleaning agent. Writing in black ink on a mirror, she makes herself surface and solvent. Skin becomes animation cel; sprays and marks imply a purging from within, a shedding of psychological residue—“lax” as laxative, but for thought.

In Der Untergang der Titania (The Sinking of Titania, 1985), Mattuschka turns the titular goddess into an outcast, imagining her not as a symbol of fulfilled love but as a woman whose power stems from unrealized desire. A bathtub that should drain becomes fertile instead, filling with ink that shrouds sexuality in shadow. Titania bites an apple, muses on the absence of love, and paints a pear instead. “No one,” she insists, “can understand love better than a woman who may be enjoying it for the first time.” Longing, here, is its own gravitational field.

Likeminded interplay of embodiment and machinery pulses in Kugelkopf (Ball-Head, 1985), Mattuschka’s “Ode to IBM,” where she becomes a typewriter made of flesh. With Carmen blaring, her shaved and bandaged head becomes a stamping device, printing letters and bull’s horns in a swirl of bravado, a typewriter ribbon serving as the matador’s scarf. And outside the window, life ambles on, unaware of the performance above, an oblivious world moving in quiet amnesia.

Mattuschka’s fascination with systems culminates in Pascal-Gödel (1986), a meditation on the union of numerators and denominators. Mimi plays chess on graph paper against her own negative double. Wine pours and reverses with melodramatic impossibility. Ink seeps across the board, thought overrunning form. Silence becomes the only language capable of holding such an equation.

That tension between interior and exterior bodies shifts into nervous-system poetics in Parasympathica (1986), where sweat, tears, ejaculate, and vaginal fluid become a painterly palette. As a male voice muses about butterflies, Mattuschka appears in stark black and white, hovering somewhere between nature documentary and dreamscape. Protection and compromise blur, holding the question open.

Childhood curiosity takes on unsettling pliability in Les Miserables (1987), animated with water-soluble pigments and the artist’s own saliva. A boy and a girl wander in search of another girl, whose genitalia prompts the question, “Is that real?” Her violation reduces her to vowels, a prelinguistic utterance that is less than language. Set in the impossible year 1001, the film warns that “hearing and sight are easy to blight.” Innocence and injury fold into each other, Mattuschka’s sealing the sequence.

That same year yields Danke, es hat mich sehr gefreut (I Have Been Very Pleased), a hyper-bright faux fashion advertisement shot on a radioactive beach, where she pleasures herself as the camera steadily withdraws. Her climax dissolves into electronic distortion—witchlike, feral, uncontainable.

The dissolution of language becomes literal in Kaiser Schnitt (Caesarean Section, 1987), where alphabet soup becomes an anatomical cipher. While she cooks, an EKG line animates across paper. Utensils transform into surgical instruments; the body becomes a site where text is extracted. Mattuschka slices open an ink-filled slit, removes letters with tweezers, and arranges them through a visceral surgery.

In its aftermath, motherhood becomes both a burden and a creative engine in Der Schöne, die Biest (Beauty and the Beast, 1993). A figure climbs a hill, possibly carrying a newborn. Scenes of feeding, climbing, dressing up, reciting poems, and playing a stringless violin evoke a life pulled between creation and constraint. She emerges through a tunnel of cars, as if re-entering the world after an inner voyage.

Her 1993 S.O.S. Extraterrestria turns this negotiation outward, connecting modesty and destructiveness through unseen pipes that thread humanity’s waste beneath the surface. Covered in tights, she regards herself in the mirror, tuned to radio transmissions. Trying on clothing becomes existential calibration. She plays Godzilla, lays waste to a city through superimposition, mates with the Eiffel Tower, and is electrocuted; her voice remains half-formed, exploratory, testing the edges of articulation as everything burns around her.

A decade later, ID (2003) plunges into the horror of doppelgängers, mating, and cannibalism. Her voice drones in wordless surges as her face morphs into its own Other, the self dividing and devouring self on a never-ending escalator.

And somewhere at the center of it all sits the modest bonus piece “Ahm…”, a brief self-presentation in which Mattuschka faces the camera and utters only that single suspended syllable. Forever on the verge of speech but withholding the utterance, she captures a moment both uncomfortable and profound, a miniature manifesto of hesitation, possibility, and the unsaid.

Across these works, a single principle emerges: Mattuschka inhabits the body not as a subject but as an instrument that produces meaning through gesture, residue, and metamorphosis. Her films do not break conventions so much as dissolve the structures that make them legible in the first place. What remains is a site of simultaneous vulnerability and invention.

Mattuschka’s cinema suggests that identity is always in revision, never a noun but a verb that bargains with the world’s materials. Her forms multiply, distort, leak, and reform, questioning whether language belongs to the self or vice versa. Meaning begins long before we learn to speak and continues long after words fail. She is an archive, a painter’s brush, a battlefield, an oracle, the first medium and the last. She reminds us that being human means being perpetually unfinished, always pushing against the skin of our own becoming, always trying to articulate something just beyond what we can say. Which is why we are only left with her looking into the camera and saying, “Ahm…” It is the sound of art beginning again.

Gržinić/Šmid: A Selection of Video Works 1990-2003 (INDEX 005)

| Tyran Grillo

“Technology is never innocent.”
–Marina Gržinić

Twin ramparts of Slovenian video art rise to the proverbial occasion in the work of Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid, whose decades-long collaboration has forged a visual language rooted in fracture and the unsettled terrain of post-socialist transition. Their films operate as dispatches from the former Yugoslav region, where ideology and memory never truly loosen their grip. The critique that emerges is both intimate and structural. They carve into the spectacle of authority, revealing how power survives by mutating, how it seeps into the body and then disguises itself as habit, nostalgia, or even desire. They scrape away the veneer of official history and rebuild it as a series of contested images. In this state of permanent transition, incrustation becomes their central strategy. One image embeds itself in another as a reminder that trauma never disappears. It simply resurfaces in new forms, as persistent as a scar and as volatile as a suppressed memory. Documentary footage becomes raw material that they melt and reshape into a spectral double, a reminder that truth always has a counterpart produced by the state, the market, or the collective need to forget.

Their 1990 work Bilokacija (Bilocation) embodies this tension by staging a split between body and soul, as if the self has been forced to occupy contradictory geographies. This condition mirrors both the paradox of video and the experience of Kosovo during wartime, a place where identity was carved and recarved by border shifts and nationalist ambitions. Documentary and synthetic images intertwine while Barthes’ reflections on desire are folded into the wreckage of conflict. The result is a meditation on how war reorganizes the self. A black screen compresses itself into visibility as if to suggest that seeing requires force. Images pulsate with the ache of Europe’s unresolved past. A man’s grip on a woman’s arm becomes an aperture into videographic truth, a reminder that even personal gestures become charged when surveillance, ethnic tension, and state control shape the conditions of daily life. A drone of bees fills the soundscape while parades move through the frame. The socialist body appears sculpted by ideology yet undone by its own contradictions. A woman climbs a tower marked “Mengele,” insisting that fascism remains latent beneath the surface of Europe’s democratic self-image.

In Labirint (Labyrinth), also from 1990, the artists summon surrealism not as an aesthetic flourish but as a way to expose the irrational logic that emerges when the aftermath of upheaval becomes the norm. Bosnian refugee camps appear beside theatrical gestures, creating a portrait of a society trying to digest its own collapse. A doctor’s healing hands are powerless against the structural violence embedded in the region’s history. A dying woman’s body becomes an emblem of a ravaged homeland, a reminder that national projects too often run on human expendability. Men inspect a stripper while another peels a membrane from a woman’s body. These actions reveal how patriarchal power thrives in instability. Dancers tremble like historical residue that refuses to settle. The Actionist tremor erupting through their limbs becomes a critique of Europe’s claim to civility, a claim repeatedly contradicted by its own wars, camps, and exclusions.

With 1994’s Luna 10, the stakes widen. The artists draw from the Yugoslav neoavant-gardists yet refract their legacy through the violence of the Bosnian War and the accelerating forces of global technology. Video becomes a lens aimed at the fragmented self of the new world order. A woman lifts a telescope. Diagrams flicker. A shortwave crackles with narratives of conflict described as “radio war,” a term that recalls how states monopolize the airwaves and shape public perception through the management of signals. Domestic labor occurs alongside accounts of cross-border violence, revealing how private ritual becomes entangled with geopolitical strategy. Creativity itself appears as a tool of influence. It can inspire solidarity, but it also constructs hierarchies, invisibilities, and selective empathies. The millennial body is a fearful one because it must navigate a global landscape where production systems act as both oracle and executioner.

By 1995, the montage sharpens into satire. A3 – Apatija, Aids in Antarktika (Apathy, Aids and Antarctica) juxtaposes the wives of Ceaușescu and Milošević with scenes from The Private Life of Mirjane M., exposing how power reproduces itself through domestic performance and the spectacle of femininity under authoritarian rule. A skier moves through Communist iconography. A photographer labors in a darkroom. A body perforated by history attempts everyday chores. Milošević sings into a leek while demons wander through Styrofoam snow. The absurdity is not comedic. It is a critique of how regimes rely on myths, kitsch, and theatricality to mask structural cruelty. The “Ms” dancing in their kitchen, one with a werewolf face, reveal a deeper truth. Systems of authority mutate those who serve them. They turn the mundane into the monstrous and leave no private space untouched.

The 1997 project Postsocializem + Retroavantgardia + IRWIN (Post-socialism + Retro Avantgarde + IRWIN) turns critique into philosophical inquiry. Gržinić frames the discussion while Žižek and Weibel articulate the stakes of avant-garde resistance amid radical restructuring. Žižek argues that the avant-gardist seeks to preserve an ancient core more faithfully than the liberal desire for perpetual fragmentation. This is not a rejection of Enlightenment values but a defense against their appropriation by market forces that claim rationality while enforcing structural inequality. Retro-avant-gardism becomes an act in which reason and action invert themselves. Ideology enters the body only when the body has been damaged. Manifestos appear as shattered fragments because post-socialist reality leaves no space for unbroken narratives. Even Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle becomes an allegory in Žižek’s hands. The region’s toilets tell stories about national identity, hygiene, and cultural pride, transforming domestic infrastructure into a commentary on power.

As 1999 crests into frame, the artists widen their lens to all of Europe in O Muhah s Tržnice (On the Flies of the Market Place). The continent appears as a divided brain struggling to reconcile its imperial past with its neoliberal present. An empty swimming pool becomes a metaphor for ideological drainage, a sign that Europe is unsure whether it has shed its history or simply displaced it. Kant hovers as a ghost in the background while communism lingers as residue rather than memory.

Their 2003 work Vzhodna Hiša (The Eastern House) turns domestic space into a battleground of rehearsal. Cinema is reread through Antonioni, Coppola, Siegel, and Badiou while Gržinić’s philosophy threads its way through the narrative. A man sprays a woman with milk from a syringe. At dinner, he mutters slogans that dissolve into frustration. Directorial cues merge with diegesis as if to suggest that civic life itself is staged. Normality fractures while the body’s code is rewritten. A man wakes beside two women who whisper like conspirators. One declares that women and Eastern Europe must no longer be treated as symptoms or mute witnesses. The statement echoes across the film’s terrain of power. Sexuality becomes a site of ideological struggle. References to Alien and Blade Runner reveal a world where love is entangled with biopolitics and fear. Those unaware of their manufactured nature become the ones capable of loving freely because they have not yet internalized the hierarchies that govern them.

Technology appears again as a force that dictates which bodies receive care and which are forgotten. UNICEF enters the frame as a reminder of global humanitarian structures that simultaneously relieve suffering and reinforce social hierarchies. Human activity becomes archival. The cyber-feminist search for identity moves across surfaces where the real and the virtual collide. Gržinić and Šmid show that agency is now mediated by screens that claim objectivity yet reproduce bias at scale.

In the end, they do far more than document history. They anatomize it. They trace its scars, expose its contradictions, and return it to us as a living terrain populated by trembling bodies. Their work insists that understanding the former Yugoslav space demands a confrontation with ideology in its most intimate forms. Desire and power become inseparable. Bodies carry the aftermath of systems that promised liberation yet delivered surveillance, nationalism, and new forms of inequality. Gržinić and Šmid remind us that we live in bilocation. Our bodies remain here while our civic selves drift elsewhere, pulled between the past we inherited and the future we continue to build, often without realizing whose walls we reinforce in the process.