Bläue

Blueness

Forum Expanded Exhibition 2018

Juxtaposing images of the production sites of the pharmaceutical-chemical industry with speculations on the historical, social, and material conditions of Cyanotype photography, Blueness probes into the (gendered) politics of materiality and the (violent) historicities of its form.
The film follows a figure that proceeds through the stages of exposing and developing a Cyanotype. They revisit factories in Seveso, Italy and Basel, Switzerland that both relate directly to the history of the synthetic dye “Prussian Blue”. In the latent period, when the images are exposed but not yet developed, the figure searches to define their body as both commodity and consumer of pharmaceutical products. This body is modelled on the productive body of Fordist labor. Yet like the industrial sites that appear as remnants of an older mode of production, this body has been fundamentally reconfigured to conform to post-industrial working conditions. Subsequently, the figure aims to perform against pharmaceutical substances and prepare for a neoliberal take-over of their movements, lingering between the roles of researcher, scientist, athlete, pharmacist, patient, woman.

by Kerstin Schroedinger
with Kerstin Schroedinger, Manuela Schininà United Kingdom / Germany 2016 English, Italian 48’ Colour & Black/White

With

Kerstin Schroedinger
Manuela Schininà

Crew

Written and Directed by	Kerstin Schroedinger
Cinematography	Andreas Voß, Andrea Thal, Oliver Husain
Editing	Kerstin Schroedinger
Music	Wibke Tiarks
Sound Design	Manuela Schininà
Producer	Kerstin Schroedinger

Produced by

Kerstin Schroedinger

Kerstin Schroedinger

Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist working in performance-based moving image and sound performance. Her historiographic practice questions the means of image production, historical linearities, and ideological certainties of representation. She researches the coinciding histories of industrialization and film. Her works and curatorial practice are often collaborative. Since 2017 she is a member of LaborBerlin, an artist-run analog film lab in Berlin.

Filmography

2004 Das Monument 2007 anstatt dass 2009 as found; with Mareike Bernien, 15 min. 2010 Rigid things can always be moved about · Translating the other; with Mareike Bernien, 7 min. 2011 Red, she said; with Mareike Bernien, 13 min. 2014 Rainbow's Gravity; with Mareike Bernien, Forum Expanded 2014, 33 min. 2015 Fugue 2017 Bläue 2020 Songs of the Shirt; Forum Expanded 2021 · The Song of the Shirt

Bio- & filmography as of Berlinale 2022