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Can’t You See Them? – Repeat.

Forum Expanded Exhibition 2019
© Clarissa Thieme
Trauma prevents realities from aligning with themselves. Pain stops the puzzle pieces from fitting and forming a full picture, so the soul returns to the scene of its scarring over and over. Clarissa Thieme enters these loops of troubled remembrance: There is a video she found in the Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Archive that collects footage of the siege of Sarajevo, filmed by Nedim Alikadic. It shows militia men by a river in a residential area. “Film them,” Alikadic is being urged by his companion. Handheld, the camera nervously moves, pans, and stutters as it seeks to connect to the threat before it. It is this particular camera movement that Thieme tracked with advanced digital image processing technology. The resultant meta-data now control an automatic arm and make it move a ray of light in exactly the same way the hand shifted the camera. Exactitude and ephemerality: extremes meet. The closer ones gets to the traumatic real, it seems, the more strongly it fractures and disperses over different planes of representation. Thieme enters the gap between them, widening it, while simultaneously pulling the fragments of reality together into one unsettling force-field.
by Clarissa Thieme
with Nedim Alikadic, Till Beckmann, Clarissa Thieme Germany / Bosnia and Herzegovina 2016 Bosnian, English 8’ Colour Documentary form

With

  • Nedim Alikadic
  • Till Beckmann
  • Clarissa Thieme

Crew

Written and Directed by Clarissa Thieme
Cinematography Till Beckmann, Nedim Alikadic
Editing Clarissa Thieme
Sound Design Jochen Jezussek
Sound Clarissa Thieme
Production Design Constantin Engelmann
Producer Clarissa Thieme

Produced by

studio clarissa thieme

Clarissa Thieme

Born in Oldenburg, Germany in 1976. She studied Media Art, as well as Cultural Studies and Aesthetic Practice. Thieme works in the fields of film, photography, performance, installation and text, combining documentary and fictional forms with a focus on the processes of memory, identity politics and strategies of translation.

Filmography

2010 Was bleibt; 30 min., Forum Expanded 2010 · Was bleibt | Sta ostaje | What remains; 30 min., Forum Expanded 2010 2012 The Place We Left; 60 min. · The Place We Left; 60 min. 2013 Resort; 15 min. · Resort; 15 min. 2016 Die DDR hat es nie gegeben / Appell; 4 min. · Die DDR hat es nie gegeben / Appell; 4 min. 2018 Today is 11th June 1993; 15 min., Forum Expanded 2018 · Today is 11th June 1993; 15 min., Forum Expanded 2018 2019 Can't You See Them? – Repeat. · Can't You See Them? – Repeat.; 8 min., Forum Expanded Exhibition 2019

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2020