Supported by: Stiftung Kulturwerk der VG Bild-Kunst (Bonn), Liebelt Stiftung Hamburg, AG Kurzfilm, German Films and the Goethe-Institut Budapest.

Reinterpretation work within an archive is based on the experience of memory; we can reach the origin of a fact or circumstance by means of “documents”. An encounter with the archaic is also an archaeological activity — recollection work that involves the personal unearthing of various materials at a place endowed with authority (the search for a lost time). It is concerned with the personal, subversive reinterpretation of official documents from the archeion (ancient Greek for the building in which the magistrates’ archives were stored), and questions the official writing of history. It also examines the emergence of memories that result from the programmatic processing of photographic archival material, the archaeological excavation of previously stored “impressions”, and the personal decoding of registering and reading records and documents: the communicating and processing of archives. Exactly this processing of the archives permits us to produce a connection with the filmic. The associative aspect is that films can be viewed as an archive and archives can be considered in a cinematographic context because of digital media.


Digital devices have fundamentally reshaped the “handling” of non-moving and moving images over the last decade. On the one hand, we are now able to record and play back both non-moving and moving images on our smartphone, tablet, computer, photo or video camera. On the other hand, we no longer regard the photo as an enlargement, but rather as something at hand, presented in a device. With a tablet, we are able to hold moving images that were once un-touchable. Our relationship with moving and non-moving images is thus being essentially altered by mobile recording and playback technologies that allow us to immediately observe, process, and forward or broadcast the recorded materials. The merger of image-producing devices, which calls for a conscious decision whether to shoot photos or film, is evidently having a clear impact on today’s artistic work.