transmediale begins its film programme remote. response. request. at transmediale studio, silent green, and presents the new Vilém Flusser Residents 2021: MELT.
In Spring, transmediale studio, silent green, will open its doors for the very first time to present the new film programme remote. response. request. The programme will consist of three iterations, each lasting for four weeks, showcasing different artists. The exact opening date will be announced at short notice, as it is based on government regulations around the pandemic.
remote. response. request. was conceived in response to film’s current state of suspension resulting from the pandemic. Bringing together a series of commissioned works that traverse the lines between cinema, exhibition, and symposium, the programme connects emergent themes across time, with a sequential framework in which ideas develop out of overlapping practices of film, writing, and performance.
As first iteration remote. response. request. I. explores the radical imagination – an essential capacity of the human self, which can open up the world and allow us to see realities untethered from dominant political and social structures. The works presented in the first programme of remote. response. request. ask what place the radical imagination has in how we see and shape the reality around us; bringing action to the present by asking us to live, and not just imagine, a different way of being. remote. response. request. I. will be installed in transmediale studio for four weeks and features Phanuel Antwi, Rhea Storr, and Sam Tam Ham.
For the Record is a call-and-response exchange between London and Vancouver that resonates from opposing ends of the new transmediale studio space. In the work, filmmaker Rhea Storr and writer Phanuel Antwi reinterpret each other’s practice and sense of place, advancing a form of diasporic archive told through the bonds of Black kinship. A screening of Storr’s film Here is the Imagination of the Black Radical follows the pair’s conversation.
Sam Tam Ham’s Te Moana Meridian calls for a relocation of the Prime Meridian from Greenwich, UK, to Te Moana-nui-ā-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean). Based on a real proposal to the United Nations General Assembly, Ham’s work looks to challenge prevailing Western realities of space and time.
In cooperation with Vilém Flusser Archive at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), transmediale announces MELT as Vilém Flusser Residents 2021. Their project Meltionary investigates different materials, metaphors, and modes of melting, in order to question how coloniality, climate change, and technological developments are intertwined. MELT (Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr) are arts-design researchers who work together on games, technology, and critical pedagogy. Their work crumbles structures, unbinds materials, dissolves technology, and assembles collectivities.
During their Summer 2021 residency, MELT will develop Meltry entry “A – Archiving the Unstable”, and explore how processes of melting set in motion events that cannot be measured by single timestamps.
February Release – online since 27 February Featuring Ellen Pau, Joel Kwong, and Glacier Kwong; Michelle Doyle; Nora O Murchú and Lorena Juan; Lorena Juan with Eli Cortiñas and Patricia Domínguez; Mihaela Brebenel; and Pete Jiadong Qiang.
March Release – online from 28 March Featuring Karyn Recollet and Jason Edward Lewis with Tiara Roxanne; Laura Yuile, Simone Niquille and Shannon Mattern with Nora O Murchú; Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana; and !Mediengruppe Bitnik.
transmediale is funded as a cultural institution of excellence by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) since 2004. A full list of partners and supporters can be found here.