TBA

Blockseminar mit Alisa Berger.

11-12.5.2026 10-17 ZFM Seminarraum
13-15.5.2026 10-17 ZFM Videostudio 

Max. 12 Teilnehmer*innen, TBM Studierende haben Vorrang.

The block seminar focuses on personal film, oral history, camera-less storytelling, memory, and artistic practices that challenge ideological historiography and conventional narrative forms. Individual family histories, genealogies, and archives are approached as material situated within political and aesthetic contexts.

The seminar is practice-oriented. While collective screenings and discussions form part of the course, the primary emphasis lies on experimentation and execution. Through hands-on exercises and short-form experiments, dialogue emerges from concrete artistic processes rather than remaining at a purely conceptual or research-based level. This approach encourages early formal decisions and first artistic gestures, countering tendencies to remain in prolonged conceptualisation without entering production.

Taking the film Three Borders as a central reference, the seminar investigates personal film and family archives as cinematic strategies to counter ideological, national, and systemic forms of historical erasure.

The film operates through genealogical fragments, oral transmission, and archival displacement, tracing family histories across political systems in which individual biographies are often subordinated to collective identity — whether under federal governance, capitalist or communist regimes, as well as within social and community structures.

Three Borders works through anecdote, repetition, omission, and the deliberate removal or substitution of images, foregrounding how memory persists precisely where official historiography fails. Positioned in an anti-documentary register, the film introduces fictional or speculative elements and employs strategies associated with magical realism in order to challenge documentary authority and historical coherence.

Building on this approach, the seminar explores a range of related methods: experimental work with archives, the projection of archival logic onto non-archival images, personal oral history as artistic material, and the productive use of absence — of images, documentation, or evidence — as a means of tracing family histories and dynasties not as linear heritage, but as contested, unstable, and politically shaped formations.