Angela Melitopoulos. Cine(so)matrix

Cine(so)matrix

Angela Melitopoulos

Angela Melitopoulos

Considered one of the most outstanding gures on the European artistic scene in recent decades, Angela Melitopoulos (Munich, 1961) addresses issues such as the migratory experience, popular struggles against predatory practices in industrial society, the capacity for resistance among minority groups, and the prevalence of magical thinking in contemporary culture. Her critical approach to these subjects cannot be separated from her re ections on the language of video and image, and the possibilities they a ord in constructing individual or collective identities. Taking Cine(so)matrix as a title, a term Melitopoulos coined in reference to her own practice, this exhibition held in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía showcases the most signi cant projects undertaken by the artist from the late 1990s to the present day.

By featuring such a wide range of her work, the show makes evident how constant her will to experiment has been, as well as her willingness to collaborate with other intellectuals and creators. A display of multiscreen video installations re ects Melitopoulos’s interest in experimenting with ways of working with sound and visual stimuli that transcend the traditional cinematographic experience. The spatial design and use of multiple screens allows the artist to pursue a narrative style that endeavors to capture the nonlinear workings of human thought.

While constituting a technological challenge, putting on a show like this a ords us the chance to get to know the bulk of Melitopoulos’s work from the last few decades and identify the principal threads that connect her art to her broader investigation into video. The texts and essays gathered in this catalogue in turn help us to appreciate key aspects of her vision and navigate the various audiovisual experiments she’s performed in an already extensive career.

Miquel Iceta i Llorens Minister for Culture and Sport

Since studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Korean artist and video-art pioneer Nam June Paik, Angela Melitopoulos (Munich, 1961) has developed a practice based on rigorous artistic research and an expanded sense of what video is. As the Italian thinker Maurizio Lazzarato notes, Melitopoulos’s research, Bergsonian in nature, reached a watershed moment when she discovered “an atomic, molecular movement” in video technology that made a new sense of perception and way of shooting and editing video possible, one “necessarily di erent from cinema.” According to Lazzarato—with whom Melitopoulos regularly collaborates and whose essay Video loso a. La percezione del tempo nel postfordisme (1996) largely arose from his interest in her work—trying to capture and work with videographic images at the “molecular level,” in a sort of updating of the theories of philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, became the principal leitmotiv of Melitopoulos’s work from then on. Her video essay Passing Drama (1999) is a seminal piece in this respect.

Melitopoulos starts out from the premise that we must appreciate that the world is forever “in course”: it is never there; it is not what it is, but what is happening, and it is therefore only ever revealed to us in fragments, more as an occurrence than a fait accompli or a thing in and of itself. The particular complexity, as well as the disruptive power and experiential and political essence of Melitopoulos’s work, resides in this, her “event-led gaze” a gaze that does not seek to create a representation of the world but rather make the world, as a process in course, run through her work. She does this based on her conviction that video technology, through the possibility of processing and recombining ows of captured images and sounds, can o er an experience of pure perception and serve to “speak of the e ects and processes that occur prior to representation and discourse.”

The artist has often compared her way of understanding and working with video to weaving, whereby she weaves ows as opposed to cotton or woolen threads. These ows might overlap or become tied in knots, creating an image that, as Lazzarato puts it, “is not just a point of detention but a moment from which other ows might depart.” Continuing with the textile metaphor, her works are like giant looms that constantly weave and unweave, requiring viewers to be receptive to and accepting of the fact that there isn’t only one way to relate to them, rather each viewing entails a di erent experience. Melitopoulos de nes this way of working with video, as well as the spatial form she gives her installations, with the procedural and the corporeal put center stage and the idea of displacement—in its multiplicity of senses—playing a fundamental role, as Cine(so)matrix

Passing Drama—which opens the exhibition and is, as mentioned above, a seminal work in terms of the development of her particular poetics—is a video essay about migrant memory that takes her own family history as a starting point: as part of the Greek minority in Turkey in the 1920s, her father’s family felt compelled to emigrate and move to Germany. The speci c way that migrants and refugees relate to their past, present, and future became a key component of her work after that, both as a theme and a methodology.

The procedural dimension and the idea of the journey—in the literal and gurative sense—became central to the projects she developed in the 2000s. It was during this period that she coined the

term “timescape,” a concept that would lend its name to a web-based, multiauthored project she took part in: Timescapes. The video installation Corredor X (2006) emerged as a product of this synergy: a collaboration between video artists and activists from Germany, Serbia, Greece, and Turkey, the work spoke of the impact major European Union transport infrastructure projects have on the land and communities in which they are developed. Melitopoulos’s contribution, Unearthing Disaster I (2013)—about the construction of an open-pit gold mine in Skouries, a forest in Greece— focused on capitalist processes and the unstoppable will to extract.

As Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi notes, “Melitopoulos’s camera bears witness to the controlling gaze of the vigilant eye.” Her lm The Cell. Antonio Negri and the Prison (2008), which speaks of Antonio Negri’s trials, as well as his escape, detention, and subsequent liberation, exposes the control mechanisms that society prescribes not only to prisoners, but to everyone else besides. Throughout the work, structured as four interconnected chapters, Melitopoulos challenges the conventions of the biographical genre and explores the possibilities for nonlinear narration that the DVD format allows.

Seeking a form of audiovisual experimentation that transcended narrative norms, which she felt only served to legitimize capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal logics, Melitopoulos found herself drawn to Félix Guattari’s concept of “machinic animism.” This theory explores the potential for thinking with decentralized, nonanthropomorphic subjectivity by forming open relationships with all beings and things, as proposed by Walter Benjamin in his essay “On Language as Such and the Language of Man” (1916). Melitopoulos uses extracts from Benjamin’s text in her work The Language of Things (2007), in which she investigates and tries to recreate the “sensorial state of material communality with things” experienced in technology-dependent environments such as theme parks.

The video installations Assemblages (2010) and The Life of Particles (2012), produced in collaboration with Maurizio Lazzarato, are likewise based on the concept of “machinic animism.” In both works, Melitopoulos goes deeper in her experimentation with installations comprised of hybrid devices that allow for a spatial redistribution of sound and visual stimuli. In Brigitta Kuster’s words, these “installed assemblages” allow “audio-vision in motion to be introduced into the space in di erent forms,” enabling Melitopoulos to explore and create new “spaces of performative possibility.” The same goes for The Refrain (2015), which takes Deleuze and Guatarri’s concept of ritornello as its departure point in order to consider the importance of repeated gestures, chants, and words for communities ghting the US military presence on the islands of Okinawa (Japan) and Jeju (South Korea). By basing their resistance struggle on ritual, the inhabitants of both places express and thus preserve the emotional link they have with the territories they are being dispossessed of.

In the two most recent pieces that feature in the show, ZONKEY – Learning to Speak with Earth (2020–2023) and Matri Linear B (an ongoing research project that began in 2021), Melitopoulos further challenges the colonial notion of territory, the extractive culture it is based on, and the visual technologies that support it. The rst piece, a sonic research work developed alongside Kerstin

Schroedinger, seeks to generate a “listening device” based on the sounds that emerge from the rural landscape of the Pulkautal valley, in Lower Austria. The premise is that we need to rekindle our listening relationship to the land, a matrix of hearing and responding to our surrounds that (once again) conceives of landscapes as “speaking landscapes” or “agencies that make pronouncements we need to learn to read.” The same argument underpins Matri Linear B, an artistic investigation that is still underway but has so far produced two pieces—Surfacing Earth (2021) and Revisions (2022)—that feature here.

Through the ten works on display, Cine(so)matrix traces the course of Melitopoulos’s career from 1999 to the present day, making it the most ambitious retrospective of her work ever staged in Spain. By the same token, the exhibition further cements the artist’s relationship with the Museo Reina Sofía, which originated with the museum’s acquisition of Crossings (2017) and Déconnage (2012) for its video-installation collection. The rst work, originally devised for documenta 14 in Athens, featured in Episode 8. Exodus and Communal Life as part of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Communicating Vessels Collection, providing a re ection on the thorny issue of north-south relations in the context of the 2008 recession in Greece. The second work, an earlier piece, is a video essay about linguistic experimentation in Francesc Tosquelles’s psychiatric practice, a work made in conjunction with Maurizio Lazzarato and shown as part of the Museo Reina Sofía’s exhibition Francesc Tosquelles. Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field (2022–2023). The present show seeks to deepen our understanding of Melitopoulos’s artistic practice by a ording us the opportunity not only to see some of her most signi cant projects but also appreciate how her singular way of working with space, sound, and the moving image rst took shape and evolved. Her belief in adopting a self-re exive approach to audiovisual and installation media—whereby a project’s method connects to its themes in an organic way—is duly emphasized, as is her use of procedural and collaborative dynamics. The exhibition is complemented by this publication, a collection of texts that allow us to delve deeper into key components of her work and see just how radical and wide-ranging her mission to challenge dominant narratives has been.

Manuel Segade

Director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

PASSAGES AND COLLECTIVE MEMORY

NEW SUBJECTIVITIES AND OTHER POSSIBLE FORMS OF RESISTANCE

ASSEMBLAGES AND ANIMISM

CONNECTIVE LANDSCAPES

CONVERSATION WITH FRIENDS

Elisabeth von Samsonow, Kerstin Schroedinger, and Brigitta Kuster.

Conversation conducted and edited by Margarita Tsomou

Passing Drama, 1999, 66 mins.

Timescapes/B-Zone (2003–2006); Corridor X, 2006, 80 mins.

Crossings, 2017, 109 mins.

THE INSISTENT MEMORY OF THE NAMELESS

Angela Melitopoulos

Unearthing Disaster I, 2013, 36 mins.

The Cell. Antonio Negri and the Prison, 2008, 121 mins.

Déconnage, 2012, 100 mins.

The Refrain, 2015, 66 mins.

THE CONTINUITY OF A THOUGHT

Maurizio Lazzarato

Assemblages, 2010, 71 mins.

The Life of Particles, 2012, 82 mins.

The Language of Things, 2007, 37 mins.

WHEN THE CAMERA EYE DESCENDS INTO THE DEEP EARTH AND SPEAKS IN THE LANGUAGE OF PARTICIPATION: MATRIXIAL WEAVING FOR POLITICAL AUTONOMY

Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi

Matri Linear B. Part 1: Revisions, 2022, 103 mins.

Matri Linear B. Part 2: Surfacing Earth, 2021, 71 mins.

THE VIDEO PHILOSOPHER

Kerstin Schroedinger

ZONKEY – Learning to Speak with Earth, 2020–2023.

16 Conversation Elisabeth von Samsonow, Conversation conducted

26 Passing Drama

40 Corridor X

58

72 The Insistent Angela Melitopoulos

86 Unearthing Disaster

102 The Cell. Antonio

112

124The Refrain

138 La continuidad

Maurizio Lazzarato

148

Assemblages

158 The Life of Particles

170 The Language

The Refrain

184 When the camera and speak in the matrixial weaving

Arantzazu Saratxaga

200 Matri Linear

218 Matri Linear

234 The Video Philosopher Kerstin Schroedinger

238 Zonkey – Learning

CONVERSATION WITH FRIENDS

Elisabeth von Samsonow, Kerstin Schroedinger, and Brigitta Kuster. Conversation conducted and edited by

Margarita Tsomou

TSOMOU: Let’s start with a situational genealogy, that is, with a description of our connection to Angela Melitopoulos and her work—because we meet up with Angela and the lms at the common “Crossings” of various paths . . .

KUSTER: My rst meeting with Angela was through her lm Passing Drama (1999). I had been in Berlin for about a year, traveling with groups, debates, and projects involved in art and politics, and in our shared at we had a VHS cassette of Angela’s recently nished lm. I don’t remember how we got hold of it, it was an informal cut, a sort of black copy, which quickly wore out because I watched the lm over and over again. To cut a long story short: Passing Drama represented at that time—and not only for me—an aesthetic and historical challenge. It was neither simply autobiographical—the topos of subjective, autobiographical narration in lm, especially with respect to minority experiences such as migration or queerness, was only just emerging at the time and shook certain attitudes in Germany toward history with a capital H—nor did it complete and correct an o cial historical narrative. Its fragmented way of weaving microsensations, cutting and connecting threads of temporality, rhythms, small melodies, and expanding durations, the way the lm enlarges textures, brings places, practices, and gestures into play; all of this struck me directly, without my really understanding why or what it was about. And since I couldn’t easily understand “it”—that is, the lm—I simply embarked on the sort of magical dream journey that the cinematic processuality in Passing Drama wrapped me in.

SCHROEDINGER: I have probably known Angela for the shortest time of us all, but very intensely. Of course, I was already familiar with her work before we met. Passing Drama was also very important for me personally in dealing with German history in the post-Nazi period. The link between autobiography and the historical and current political situation is striking, but so too is the link with traveling—or better said, with “being in movement.” This is something we have experienced a great deal together: going to certain places and relating to those places. We have been accompanying each other in this practice since 2019: this “network”—of worlds, people, or landscapes—that Angela weaves by moving from one place to another.

SAMSONOW: Yes, she swoops like an eagle into the center of the action. What was signi cant in our case was the discovery that our mothers had both looked at the same range of hills when they were children, and that we had actually then also gazed at the range of hills—the Samerberg hills (in Germany), to be precise—Angela’s mother comes from. That is a strong connection. Then there is this double story with her—the Greek father, a forced laborer interned in Austria, and the violent story of the migration of her paternal grandmother. And on the other hand there is this Bavarian story, which, even if it doesn’t seem that exciting at rst glance, gains depth with the solidarity inherent in Angela’s view of territorialization. These are the primal scenes of our friendship. And there is something like the “secondary literature” of the whole thing, namely the French intelligentsia, embodied by Eric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato, who were already collaborating back then and who met in my apartment in Vienna to write. They brought a woman with them: Angela. At that time, these thinkers were in the vanguard: in any case, maybe that was what they thought themselves. But anyway, we were there, and we had our own story. These were the frames in which we socialized. The poststructuralist nomenclature of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and Toni Negri, Francesc Tosquelles . . . a constant temptation. My struggle to liberate myself from this consisted of relating my book Anti-Electra: The Radical Totem of the Girl to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia That interested Angela: How did this Electra appear in this eld that these men had tried to comprehend? I am not an essentialist feminist, but there were thresholds to be crossed for both of us to move beyond this kind of structural temptation. This, then, was the machine opératoire (operative machine) in which we met and got to know one another.

TSOMOU: I also share with Angela, on the one hand, the postmigrant experience and being located in the place called Greece. This is not an identical equation, in the sense of an identity, but one that is mediated by the constant shifts in location in our biographies, which also connect us as embodied experiences. We are also constantly concerned with the question of how to understand, observe, and comprehend the world as nonmen. So that this nomenclature is displaced and no longer has the sole claim to be in a position to comprehend the world. These are methodological questions, more than anything else. Because a narrative that is as di erent as that of the lms is not even the narrative of a myth of origin, or as Brigitta said, not History with a capital H. Not another antithesis or statement.

KUSTER: Yes, exactly. I think it was this cinematic power that led me to Angela, because it was much more than the statements, but maybe more the linguistic sounds, that is, the oral scraps— at the same time a place of change and a source—the sounds, colors, durations, and in ections of the video generators used, which made me travel within the body of Passing Drama. This whole complex of the themes and experiences of the transgenerational chain of ight and migration, which is its subject, from the catastrophe in Asia Minor, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Second World War, deportation and forced labor, etc., to the so-called guest work of the Fordist welfare regime of Western Europe . . . All of this, however, is a story that is never represented, and certainly not told in a linear manner. It is more a suggestive passage, a journey on which one is sent as a spectator, with no clearly de ned starting points or points of return. The lm draws you into this complex by doing something with your perception, through its expansion and contraction,

through its substantiation of signs. Everything is in transition between forgetting, breaking o , and passing on. There is stu like nodes and superimpositions or even recursions all the time . . . I had never seen such a cinematic use of video as a medium of transmission, and it was maybe because I could hardly decipher it that it captivated me so much. Only much later did I realize that Passing Drama had set the tone at that time, radically challenging the conception that the majority society in Germany and Western Europe had of its own foundation and history.

TSOMOU: You, Elisabeth, once said that the lms had “cut open realities,” and Kerstin, you said that with respect to their production methods they follow orders that di er from conventional lm practice in terms of the starting point, how one lms and how one cuts . . .

SAMSONOW: This “cutting open realities” is a form of sublime interpretation at which Angela excels. She challenges the visible, and then something happens; that is, the world answers her. The world becomes extremely epiphanic when Angela is around. Things happen where you think: Who ordered that? Why is this person suddenly talking like that? He had never said anything, then suddenly he explains himself in detail in front of her camera. I don’t think you can explain that with the syntactic means of moving-image analysis. It is more a kind of psychonautism carried out with the aid of a camera. This is what makes these lms so powerful, this total a rmation of the social responsiveness of the world, a world with multiple agents: worlds, and villages, and landscapes and cities, and industries, and streets, and people, birds and bacteria.

KUSTER: They are immediate audiovisual cinematic transmissions. They are linked to memory, but also to the future, in a way that Maurizio Lazzarato has described as asigni cant semiotics. So there is a kind of lm reception that is not necessarily, or certainly not only, conscious viewing, understanding, and reconstruction of meaning.

SCHROEDINGER: Yes! Even in the run-up to their production, there is no form for these lms, they work by enabling complex situations to arise, which then become images. It is, if you like, a kind of order of chaosmosis. The lms become an invitation to the viewers to decide for themselves where to direct their gaze, that is, to arrange things themselves. Her audiovisual installations are usually not only about seeing an image—they are also cinematic and spatial situations into which one enters. One never experiences the same situation twice. This corresponds more to the representability of the world and also has a very musical aspect. She works with rhythms or melodies, as in a process of improvising music.

TSOMOU: Watching a lm with conscious understanding, as you called it, Brigitta, is often not easy given the plurality of viewing possibilities. Because, in addition to the multiscreen installations that Kerstin mentioned, there is rarely only one screen to be looked at but always at least two, plus the spatial division of the images within the room; they are not necessarily placed next to each other. The viewer is not told how to watch the lm, just as the interviewees are not told how to tell the story. There is a level of contingency that nds its order in the searching movement and the things that happen in that movement, rather than there being a discernible cause-and-e ect relationship with the narratives.

KUSTER: I could talk about Crossings (2017), where the indirect presentation, seeing lms en plein milieu, in the cross re of four picture walls or windows, takes one deeper into the earth in time and space. Usually, it’s the appearance of a sound—creaking, cracking, drilling, pounding, banging, rustling, scratching, sweeping, or a song—that makes one turn and move toward an image event, accept it or oppose it. Channeling, monitoring, cargoization, shipping, administration: “Where are we going?” “What has happened?” “Here we are in the land of passages.” When you watch Crossings, you actually have to dance.

SAMSONOW: I think that she actually started using the split screens at an important moment, that is at a point when, in philosophy, the linearity of the ow of consciousness was questioned for the rst time, and one suspected that this nonlinearity could be expressed through the copresence of various currents. In Angela’s work these processes are not identi catory but rather highly disidenti catory: you see that all of these people are singular. How they step in front of the camera and relate their own story within their own space.

TSOMOU: It is not always the same sort of knowledge that appears. It is very rare for the interviewees to appear out of their context in a classic interview situation, they are more often contextualized testimonies. The kind of knowledge that comes from someone having walked across a territory for twenty years is absolute expertise. It is not absolute truth.

SAMSONOW: As a result, her works are often epic, distended. It takes a while to see all of these screens, and one shifts into a comprehensive (?) state in which one develops a compacted understanding, with complex connections and di erent approaches that one pieces together oneself.

TSOMOU: These forms of seeing through the speci c materiality of the lms and the screens naturally also evoke speci c forms of content-related coupling between narratives, themes, and stories. There is, for example, the movement of migration, not only as history but also as a situational experience that is interwoven with the macrostructures of politics, if I understand you correctly, Brigitta.

KUSTER: Yes, the theme of migration is my second meeting ground with Angela, in the exhibition and research projects on the formation of the European borders and the history of migrations that we worked on together. Or questions of the remediation of stories of exile and their transposition into lm. When someone asks her why people migrate, Angela gives an original and astonishing explanation: to avoid becoming stupid. Migration is not merely a hike from A to B, that is, a displacement in space, but also an a rmation of the mobility of life, as opposed to the ction of stagnation. It is about the search for leaps and shifts in sensibilities (i.e., processes of being, forms of perception and creation as poiesis), which permit the formation of alignments. And what if there are no places of refuge, but only places from which to ee?

TSOMOU: Stories and scenes of migration recur constantly, from Passing Drama to Crossings, and I see other predominant aspects of Angela’s political argument that are reiterated: topics like

the capitalist accumulation and appropriation processes of megaprojects, often in connection with extractivist appropriation. From the Baghdad Railway in Corridor X (2006) to the gold mine owned by the Canadian group Eldorado Gold in Skouries in Northern Greece, or the gradual enclosure of territories in Lower Austria or Australia.

SAMSONOW: Absolutely. And her approach always involves a movement of integration. As with Skouries, the Matri Linear B series of lms integrated the narrative into interviews with the participants: How are you? And there too, Angela drew out of the farmers things that I had never heard in all the twenty years I have lived here. I already understood how they feel emotionally neutralized and that this is also a form of displacement, in spite of the fact that they still work on this land and that it belongs to them. This also means that the liberation of small farmers in the nineteenth century has been reversed by this capitalist EU-controlled operation of selfenslavement, even though they own the land. This was really a discovery in the lm. It was just as controversial as the research into Eldorado Gold in Skouries. It created an allegory of these global conditions, a form of antithesis, even: the erosion of this relationship of our farmers with their land, which belongs to them but with which they no longer have a direct relationship, is compared to that of the people in Australia who are ghting to protect their existing relationship with the land but do not own it. It’s incredible to show all this in juxtaposition.

TSOMOU: It is not self-explanatory that a lm about agriculture in Lower Austria and another about Aboriginal land relations in Australia should practically be part of the same series, given our anthropological gaze that determines who speaks to what and who belongs where.

SCHROEDINGER: I believe that the problem lies more in the separations within these territories. They are arti cially imposed. The lms show subtle connections, which maybe go further than the body. Matri Linear B is also very much about dryness, drought, or dust as a physical memory—and this is perceptible in both places, in Austria and in Australia. This is revealed visually, but one might remember how it feels when it’s dusty or dry, or too hot. This also has to do with the fact that the protagonists are not only human beings but also the landscape or the microcosms; the water that is lacking is a protagonist, or the fruits, or the blades of grass. And this reveals the contrast in values: in Lower Austria, the landscape is very beautiful, and the fruits and the archaeological discoveries attest to a kind of wealth that is being assigned increasingly less value. We could see in this a parallel with Aboriginal knowledge, which has been completely devalued by colonialism. And this can be connected with Passing Drama in that it is about genocidal stories that are expanded to a planetary scale. It is Angela’s desire to interview the local people that gives her access to this. Not to come up with a simple answer, but to listen to the “how”: how they describe why the world is so horrendous.

KUSTER: Yes, the layers of transmission that Angela works on communicate more by means of a ective links than through the chronological temporality of history. I think that after Passing Drama, Angela began working more intensely within the space. The gure of the archivist as an archaeologist, the interior of the earth, cosmic issues that might arise from the geological dimension of sedimentation, but also from dislocation, the sudden breaking o of a tectonic layer,

whereupon another layer appears in its place and creates bizarre formations . . . these preoccupations coincide increasingly with Angela’s installation research into agencement. Moving audio-vision is brought into the space in di erent ways, as Angela constantly explores performative “spaces of possibility.” One of the characteristic spaces she has created is certainly the vertical space, which falls and rises over three screens in Assemblages (2010), but there are also the journeys along the Balkan autoputs (in Corridor X and Timescapes/B-Zone). Then, I don’t know . . . Kerstin, Margarita, and Elisabeth, tell me how you see space in the Matri Linear B works . . .

SAMSONOW: These works were created in the context of the Reading the Earth research project, part of our The Dissident Goddesses1 project. It was very clear that this connection between geology and history had to be made, and now the historical moment had come to think in these terms. So, what if we have to take the earth into consideration in every one of our acts? The earth, as it were, as a plan, as a diagram, as an archive. That was the challenge: to imagine not a at layer beneath the earth’s surface but a vertical sequence of layers, to be read semantically. And that is why in the lm there are these attempts at reading with respect to the earth’s surface, cultivation, and archaeology, these attempts at reading that move into verticality and create images from it.

SCHROEDINGER: The music in ZONKEY was also developed in relation with the landscape. It was an attempt to communicate with the earth, a “Learning to Speak with Earth.”2 We thought about how one could contact the earth, through sounds and music. Then we began to work with miking. At rst we thought we would use the basement of Elisabeth’s house as a kind of sound room. If you look at the scaling, these pipes in the basement are arranged side by side, like organ pipes in Pulkautal. But it seemed too big an intervention, and we wanted to listen rst. We set up our instruments in Elisabeth’s basement, and we pointed the microphones toward the exterior and tried to hear what was coming, to respond to it. We were not trying to create music professionally but to nd out, rather like with camerawork, if it is in any way possible to communicate with the earth and to record what happens when we do so.

TSOMOU: I think that the music, which was composed through situational improvisations, bears a similar signature to the images. Elisabeth once said that the images had a pulsating quality. The music is not a soundtrack in the sense that the music is placed over the images; sometimes it is the music that guides an entire scene and it is not the image at all that directs one’s perception. The music is totally e ective, but as a voice that speaks for itself. I think the text also functions in this way. The text is not o -text in that sense. These are streams of consciousness

SCHROEDINGER: I would consider both to be comments, rather than information about the images. In Matri Linear B. Surfacing Earth (2021) the music is our voices. An accompanying comment or speech that happens physically. This means that our bodies are virtually inside the image, even if they are only occasionally visible. They actually determine the images.

TSOMOU: Yes, one can perceive the di erent sound sources, sometimes music but also, as Brigitta said before, cracking, hammering, digging through the earth, a hissing sound, and then the blades of grass that push themselves into the image, or the rocks. And then the construction sites and the

excavators, and over and over again these journeys, this looking out of the car window. All this creates improbable connections or links between the themes and the narratives: between Paleolithic forms of community and contemporary agriculture in Matri Linear B. Revisions, or between the history of gold in Lavrion in ancient Greece and extractivism in the gold mine of Skouries in Crossings

KUSTER: For example, Crossings takes up the questions of movements of ight, of poietic resistance in a longue durée3 of Europeanization on the one hand (through imperial wars, expropriation, accumulation, debt economy, civil war, uprisings, and exile), and on the other hand at the limits of historicity, in the visceral center of our hitherto exclusively planetary existence(s). It is about earth time, that is, the possibility of demarcating the territory of one’s own body from collective embodiments, as some decolonial feminists would say. Capitalism is never just a mode of production, as it says in one part of Crossings, but always also a mode of destruction. And you, you are always right in the middle of this “land of sorrow,” which is revealed cinematically primarily through tracking shots and journeys.

TSOMOU: Or in Corridor X, where the political macrolevel is combined with this whole panorama of subjectivation with which I am only too familiar: The autobahn route to Greece, from Germany, passing through Yugoslavia, along which we Greeks living in Germany all traveled every summer holiday, becomes a road trip. During this road trip we learn how this route became an instrumental pipeline of capitalist domination, playing a frontline role in neocolonial industry. So we drive along the route with her and learn on the way, through testimonies, about the post–Eastern Bloc period, the Yugoslav Wars, traveling to Bismarck’s Baghdad Railway and then back to her brother’s childhood memories of taking the same route. These are yet more layers, or bands, which are both autonomous and connected, side by side or one above the other, in a way that would have been improbable before.

SAMSONOW: It’s actually something like a stacked horizon. For Matri Linear B, Angela said early on that she envisioned a work in which horizons would appear to be stacked, like lines of ships. There is a track, then there is another interpretation, or a story about it. But this interpretation is never an instruction, never the kind of voice-over that usually runs over the images of documentary lms.

KUSTER: Indeed, there are often moments of synchronization, when pots and drums are banged, when singing and shooting happen at once and all the screens are on: but a woman’s voice already rises over and above all that.

SAMSONOW: In Déconnage, the use of the voice was very clear to me. There is an interview with Francesc Tosquelles shown on video, and Jean-Claude Pollack and I keep stopping the video and commenting. It is rather a monstrous triptych, since one is dead and the others are alive and we all speak to each other—but strangely enough also not to each other. It was weird, although at the same time it made sense, because we were responding to someone whose speech had already ended. Unfortunately, Tosquelles was no longer able to answer me. He thought that the best and most sensible thing would be if analytic dialogue took on a rhythm through the regular and

intermittent use of the word merde. We also did something regularly in the lm, maybe a merde, but a bit more prolonged. It’s about understanding or not understanding. Tosquelles’s radical acknowledgement of nonunderstanding made it possible for psychiatric clients to express themselves free from constraint and free from judgment, free from interpretative violence. He speaks with a heavy dialect that is almost impossible to understand, and this was bene cial for the psychiatric patients because they thought, “He’s a bit stupid, he doesn’t understand anything anyway.” So of course, in that respect, it is highly sophisticated how Angela then uses this very way of speaking in dialect. It’s such dazzling comedy, performing a scene with the talking head Tosquelles as three tableaux vivants

SCHROEDINGER: There is no explanation either, just continuous talking. That’s why it’s such fun to listen to and watch.

TSOMOU: It’s a bit like we were saying before. These are not statements. They are something else.

Endnotes

(1) The Dissident Goddesses network is an association of female researchers and artists who are interested in opening up access to paleolithic and neolithic female gurines discovered in Lower Austria in varied and experimental ways; see https://www.tdgn.at/

(2) Learning to Speak with Earth is a research project component of The Dissident Goddesses network; see https://www.tdgn.at/learning-to-speak-with-earth/

(3) Editorial note: A term that literally means “long duration” introduced by the French historian Fernand Braudel. It is used to indicate a perspective on history that extends further into the past than both human memory and the archaeological record so as to incorporate climatology, demography, geology, and oceanology, and chart the e ects of events that occur so slowly as to be imperceptible to those who experience them.

Passing Drama

1999

By Angela Melitopoulos

Single-channel video, stereo, 66 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 4:3

VO Greek, German

Subtitles available in English, German, French, and Spanish

The video essay Passing Drama renders a close listening of Angela Melitopoulos’s migration history that was handed down across three generations. “Drama” is the name of a small town in Northern Greece where refugees who had survived the Asia Minor Catastrophe settled down after 1923. Many of their children then became forced laborers in Nazi Germany during World War II and even later guest workers in Germany. Their history was shaped by Turkey, Greece, and Germany’s concealing of historical facts and by the need to forget the traumatic experiences of exodus of these rst and second generations of refugees: ssures and discontinuities gaped open in the transfer of memory, of knowledge, of habits of thinking and living. The forgetting of yesterday was interwoven with the forgetting of the day before yesterday and mingled with forgetting of today. But in their words and stories traces of a collective memory are embodied in their voices: because they uttered and repeated inextinguishable sentences—“sentences like stones”—in various circumstances, they crystallized into song lines about deportation, displacement, and ight. The memories of these migrants contain a truth that does not only apply to them. For what happened to them has also happened to us: a radical change in living one’s memory and one’s time.

The notation of forgetting is expressed in Passing Drama through a woven montage of images that are processed in di erent ways. The farther back in the past that the events took place, the more the image manipulation and montage were processed materially for the narrative. From the multiple manipulations of image speed, di erent degrees of “time abstraction” are attributed to the “generation” of the story accordingly.

Images of industrial looms appear repeatedly between sequences. These images not only provide sociological depictions (many refugees worked in the textile industry) but also function as a paradigm of the lm’s narrative construction.

History appears as industrial machinery that devours minorities on behalf of an invisible majority. In its narration structure, Passing Drama is neither documentary nor ction. Instead, it deals with the choice between polyvocality and unanimity, between shorter or longer vocal phrases, between open and closed logics of a story, which characterizes the refugee story in general. Trauma, dramatic escapes, and survival strategies determine the levels the story is perceived on as constitutive psychologies.

Timescapes/B-Zone

Concept for a collective nonlinear video-editing project between Germany and Turkey

A project by Angela Melitopoulos

Timescapes/B-Zone was a cooperative nonlinear montage project. Over the course of three years (2003–2006) a group of lmmakers, media activists, and artists from Turkey (the VideA Media Collective from Ankara, Oktay Ince), Greece (Freddy Vianellis), Serbia (Dragana Žarevac), and Germany (Hito Steyerl, Angela Melitopoulos) worked on a collective video database called Timescapes. This image database contained twenty- ve hours of pre-edited raw material on the authors” shared geography.

Initially, every author or author group produced footage for the database independently. The creators” editing rooms were connected via the internet. During the process of montage, edit lists could be saved on a shared web page. Consequently, the process of creation that included editing was simultaneously available from di erent geographical points. This spatial distance was translated into radically artistic ways of seeing becoming evident in the montage. Working via the internet dissolved the division between production and postproduction, between creation and reception: each author remained an active agent in the processing of their material and the inherent spatiality of imagery, and was able to work individually as well as intervene in the work of the others before it was exhibited. Because it depended on this exchange via the internet, Timescapes always entailed the risk of being criticized regarding plot development or composition (for the oversimpli cation of complex processes of subjectivity, for example). The negative matrix of the concept of Timescapes lay in documentary representation, which failed to work through the existing divergences between copy image and mnemonic image.

The videos of Timescapes/B-Zone comprise ve interlinking installations and two single-screen works. The works were all edited from the same data bank material, mostly consisting of the same images and sounds, but depicting—through montage —di erent perspectives on the becoming B-Zone of Southeastern Europe after the Yugoslav Wars.

Trans-European Networks (TEN)

At the moment of the outbreak of the wars in Yugoslavia in 1992, European Union member states agreed to build up Trans-European Networks (Maastricht Treaty of 1992).

The opening of borders to free passage of persons and goods which today helps to guarantee the economic and social cohesion of the European domestic market, is not only an instrument to spur growth and employment but it is the most important instrument of European eastward expansion which drives capital flow and points the way for future economic policies.

The Trans-European Networks projects have lead to the Pan-European Transport Networks (PETRA) and the TRACECA Programs connecting Europe with China.

These programs are valued to be one of the largest infrastructure projects of the world.

The Trans-European Networks (TEN) comprise three sectors: transport, energy and telecommunications. They primarily consist of ten corridors (Corridor 1-10).

Corridors are not only superhighways but also railway lines, harbours, waterways and pipelines.

The completion of the Trans-European Networks through public-private partnerships (cost estimation 400 billion Euros). It requires investment in research and development, international organizations of experts and the improvement of financial institutions in collaboration with the European Investment Bank.

Corridor 3 across Eastern Europe is now being planned to extend to China.

Corridor X is an interpretation that focuses on the historic and contemporary signi cance of the socialist highway building project Bratsvo i Jedinstvo (Highway of Brotherhood and Unity) in former Yugoslavia. The work is a double-screen road movie recalling a travelogue that formed the collective memory of migration in Western Europe before the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s. The title refers to the 10th Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) Corridor, which is part of the TransEuropean Expansion Program begun in 1993. Departing from Munich via Salzburg, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Niš, Skopje, Veles, Thessaloníki, “Corridor X” was the classic migration route that, before 1990, migrants took in the summer to return to their home countries for holidays.

It highlights expansion through infrastructure projects by the European Union and recalls the socialist past in Southeastern Europe that included concepts of building infrastructure as active constituents of communality. Finally, it describes the situation of a territory where the conditions of mobility have fundamentally changed since 1991. These changes had an impact on how the Southeastern European territory is understood by migrant communities: until the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars, the autoput (freeway) or the “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity,” had been a collective and transcultural memory-space, a collective traveling experience, an in-between zone or a space of sovereign experience.

In the war the “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” was destroyed and became a front line in the war itself. After the war the European Union reconstructed the highway as part of the TransEuropean Transport Corridors. As Nebojša Vilić states in the lm: “Why did the EU destroy the highway in the rst place? To reconstruct it?” Ten years after the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars, when the project was recorded, the situation of mobility and migration had fundamentally shifted toward immobility.

The travelogue is composed of images of the travel along Corridor X to Greece and Timescapes data bank images from the Turkish video activist group VideA, which focuses on forced migration in Turkey, providing three case studies: the forced migration of Greeks in Turkey, the forced migration of villagers due to infrastructure projects, and the forced migration of Kurdish people from Hakkari, on the eastern border of Turkey, to Iran.

Corridor X

2006

By Angela Melitopoulos

With raw footage from the Timescapes data bank by VideA (Video Collective Ankara), Freddy Viannelis (Athens), Hito Steyerl (Berlin), Angela Melitopoulos (Cologne)

Two-channel video and ve-channel audio installation, 80 mins. Color, aspect ratio 4:3

VO German, English, Greek Subtitles available in English, and Spanish

There was an idea of connecting people as well.

This place was full of oaks and pine trees

Este lugar estaba lleno de robles y pinos

Había una idea de conectar también a la gente.

electrificación más soviética igual a revolución electrification plus soviet equals revolution

they were just puching them south.

Y simplemente los empujaban hacia el sur.

Nos gustaría que estos corredores estuvieran vivos.

We would like all these corridors to be alive.

The new Europe, yes?

La nueva Europa, ¿verdad?

Crossings

By Angela Melitopoulos

In collaboration with Angela Anderson (for the images from Skouries, Oreokastro, Mithymna/Lesbos), Pascale Criton (music composition), Maurizio Lazzarato (text), Paula Cobo Guevara (schizoanalytical workshop, Pikpa refugee camp, Lesbos), and Oktay Ince with the Seyri Sokak Video Collective (archival footage Turkey)

Four-channel video and sixteen-channel audio installation, 109 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 16:9

VO English, Greek, Italian

Subtitles available in English, German, and Spanish

* Work not exhibited in Angela Melitopoulos. Cine(so)matrix (Museo Reina Sofía, 2023) exhibition. This work has formed part of the Museum’s Collection since 2018, and it was exhibited in 2022 as part of the Museum Collection’s reorganization, Communicating Vessels.

Crossings composes a narrative about war, forms of slavery past and present, and ecological disasters. It focuses on the delirious conditions of realities that emerge from the current debt crisis in Greece, where capitalism forces neoliberal deregulations and gives rise to civil war against the people. War, destruction, and the experience of a traumatic neoliberal reality is transmitted from body to body, from generation to generation, producing countless voices. These voices are intertwined—they form new groups of expressions.

The display of four screens and sixteen speakers forms a narrative through a linked series of scenes that create tensions and relations with each other.

The scenes include the closure of the borders between Greece and Macedonia in Idomeni in spring 2016, the brutal expulsion of refugees from the harbor of Piraeus, where an extremely vulnerable group of migrants had camped under a highway overpass. Trucks depart from ships there en route to the “Norths.” In these images, money and debt are shown as producing an asymmetrical power relation that ensures creditors retain power over debtors through a civil war “by other means.”

From the stones of the ruins of Corinth, where the money system was invented in ancient Greece, we shift our gaze to the disastrous image of a huge Canadian-owned factory operating in the midst of the pristine Skouries forest, preparing to extract gold from Halkidiki in Northern Greece, thereby transforming social, cultural, and natural societies into an industrial wasteland. During the construction of the mine, Eldorado Gold has already polluted the water and forest so much that the inhabitants” basic economic commons have been destroyed; their futures will be uncertain once this factory nally opens. “They push me to think of terrorism,” an activist voice says.

An experimental schizoanalytical workshop was held in the Pipka refugee camp in Lesbos. This workshop approached the intense traumatizing experiences of border crossing through the work of rendering negatively experienced a ects into speech acts. Crossings combines the audio recordings of this workshop with tracking shots through wire fences on Lesbos. Another workshop was held in Lavrion, where the successfully self-organized Kurdish refugee camp stands in sharp contrast to the destructive organization of EU-led Moria refugee camp.

Crossings follows the becoming-chaotic- eld of a multilayered crisis in Greece (migration, extraction, economy) that demands we rethink our subjectivities and habits.

THE INSISTENT MEMORY OF THE NAMELESS

Angela Melitopoulos

“Now, now, now . . .” So begins my video essay Passing Drama (1999), the acoustic image of the story of the ight of my grandparents who, like millions of others, had to ee Asia Minor in 1922. For many of these people, the exodus did not end in Greece. Thousands of their children became forced laborers during the Second World War in Nazi Germany and, after the war, “immigrant workers” in Germany. Despite the ongoing denial of the genocides in the Ottoman Empire and in the Turkish Republic up until 1925, and despite the ongoing lack of a reappraisal of the military and political alliances of the German Reich with the Young Turks regime, I was not the only person impelled by these death and migration politics to begin documenting traces, sifting through archives all over the world and experimenting with di erent narratives, with nonlinearity, fragmentations, and image technologies.

In my essay I began to analyze the vocal melodies in the conversations I recorded, in order to work out how oral transmission is shaped from one generation to another. Over time, as I edited the recordings, I began to process the di erent qualities of repression and oblivion; that is, I slowed down and condensed my recordings and arranged them cartographically after generations of transmission.

The act of speaking played a major role in the interviews I conducted. The volitive, nonverbal aspects of the act of speaking, such as voice, intonation, gestures, volume, and body language, produced certain markers within this form of communication: beckoning gestures, heavily weighted phrases, sealed mouths, gestures repeated within victims” families, transmitted from one generation to the next, from one image to another, from one place to another. The text passages were selected from interviews not only for what they said but also for their linguistic melodies, which had become songlike through repetition.

Between 1909 and 1925, several million people were forced into exile from Asia Minor. The remembrance of the missing and of the unidenti ed dead spread throughout the entire world. This remembrance persists.

Passing Drama, then, is a memorial narrative of the exodus of refugees from Asia Minor, structured by the melody of language and electronic image editing. The memories handed down from generation to generation have been shaped by various migratory movements and temporalities. The lm deals with the canon of o cial historiography. Through the combination, layering, and rhythm of text, voice, and image, a metalevel of visualization is written into the editing process. These materializations of the processes of memory are repeated. Like the vocal melodies that unfold as refrains. In keeping with Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas about dialogue, I regard the volitive elements in speech as revealing cartographic elements; that is, the voice re ects the interlocutor and something of the places and the ideas of the narrator:

The idea lives not in one person’s isolated individual consciousness—if it remains there only, it degenerates and dies. The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to nd and renew its verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others.1

Contextualization through linguistic melodies permits the reconstruction of an event that has been erased by producing a supplementary meaning that places the speaker within the space of the listener, who is addressed in the act of speaking through markers and intonations. These metalevels persist amid the uniformity of oblivion. Milliseconds in gestures, voices, or the repetition of isolated sentences become the texture of a suppressed story, one which the protagonists in Passing Drama assert is true, “which sounds like a fairy tale, but is a true story.” I consider these metalevels to be more real than the surface layers of an anthropocentric present because they also show the break in the narrative, the rupture in the continuity in the story, destruction and transformation of memories by war and ight. No individual stories remain. So I confront the form of the representational image, the nonlinear depicted time, and the in nitesimal elements of volitive perception.

During the three years I spent editing Passing Drama, the most di cult thing was to believe that it was possible to reconnect the fragmented vestiges of such a tragic story into a politically cohesive narrative.

The director of the Sinop Biennial censored Passing Drama in 2020, even though it was then more than twenty years old. Despite the hundreds of years of state death politics in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, despite the ongoing dark alliance between Germany and Turkey, despite death politics at European borders and the erasure of history, despite the chaotic, unpredictable migratory ows, a few, increasingly rare, acts of witnessing persist and defy oblivion.

Passing Drama begins with the image of vehicles rushing by on a German motorway, lmed horizontally from the side. A voice says: “Now, now, now . . .” Each “now,” exactly a tenth of a second after the image-event of the car speeding past. Suddenly, the horizontally lmed motorway changes to a vertical image. One sees the gray surface of the road with its rhythmic stripes appearing ever nearer and dissolving faster and faster into its skimming details before suddenly transforming into a landscape. A mountain landscape composed of coarse pixels. They move backward and forward. The voice repeats:

Now

Now, now now …

machines, beating with shorter rhythms sensing the passing and so on.

Recording shifts from now to tape. Pushing buttons, past tensed buttons, in gardens of now. Repeating the past without interruption within the necessity to elapse a succession of moments identical to the moment before this way …

Repetition territory, looping for liberation, reading, rereading, reading, from now to the possible to the dreams …

Pasts intrude unremittingly into the oneiric present. Walter Benjamin’s present time is particle-like; it initiates ows and constructs connections between the unrecognizable and the recognizable.

The recording is a trace. Its border forms resonances that spread point by point until their lines create autopoietic layers, superimpositions, mixtures, giving rise to a musical refrain that one slowly begins to understand.

My works Passing Drama, Corridor X, The Cell, Déconnage, and Crossings are about the endless movement of the “great deterritorialized” populations in twentieth-century Europe—the culture of the postnational migrant proletariat. The problem of deterritorializing memory and of forgetting a ects us all, it determines the limits of our perception in general.

The Catalan resistance ghter and founder of institutional psychotherapy, Francesc Tosquelles, stated in an interview, shown in the video installation Déconnage (created with Maurizio Lazzarato, 2011), that war moves beyond and operates outside of the conventions of bourgeois reality. It “is more real than reality; it is hyperreal.” The insistent forms of forgetting through repression and

of the denial of exile, war, and genocide are disseminated throughout the world and become the machinery of a new type of remembrance that connects with other voices and crystallizes new cartographies. The recording/the record/depicted time does not so much represent as connect itself to and indicate a contiguous image.

“What happened?” is the central problem here, a question that eludes established genres and canons. A diversion in time’s being damned to linearity, against the exclusionary mechanics of representation, against the Freudian baseness of the family saga, against national epics, and against the individualistic personal stories of traumatized victims.

For all its density, the present as the densest form of the past cannot neutralize the insistent force of depicted time.2

In the illustration of nonlinear time in Henri Bergson’s book Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory), the present moment is depicted as Point S, where there is a compact form of accumulated memory of time. The image piles up di erent pasts like layers—A1, A2, B1, B2 . . .— more distant pasts and less distant pasts. For Bergson, the present is the most compact form of past. And there are distended forms of memory time that try to update themselves in the present. A second that occurred years ago becomes an hour in the present. The forces of memory thrust themselves into the present. It is a struggle. This means that narratives can be more open or more condensed depending on these interrelations.

The repetitive and complex hearing of what is actually recorded triggers these di erent temporalities: a yesterday that is connected to the forgetting of the day before yesterday and to the forgetting of today, and, as Benjamin adds to Franz Rosenzweig’s phrase, produces new monstrosities. The recognition of an immediate, magically detailed reality implies connections to something that lies beyond the image, or beyond language. One must begin to think of connectedness as being an “outside” gaze upon the deadly histories of power.

Like the children in Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things (1997), who are not themselves present on the scene of the story but observe what is happening from outside, through a window: “The God of Loss. The God of Small things. He left no footprints in the sand, no ripples in the water, no images in mirrors.” He is the god of lost things, of personal and everyday things, not the god of history who cruelly forces the “small things” to follow his lead: “Things can change in a day.”3 The melodies of the horizons are landscape rhythms, loosely adapted from Sergei Eisenstein, which magically invoke the kinetic qualities of the camera eye. These metalevels add dynamic potential to the moving image. It could lead us from a detail into a panorama at any moment, or it could become the extraordinary, curative details of eye movement in Aby Warburg’s works. He was able to recognize crazy lists and collections as orders urging him to take more and more time. Time that o ers little, for it is taken from us and relentlessly closes the panoramic window, so that those who have dropped out of history can no longer recognize anything.

It is harder to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the famous. 4

THE INSISTENT MEMORY OF THE NAMELESS

Camérer

My method of camerawork is relatively autonomous. To some extent it is a situationally based starting position that does not seek to orchestrate the outside but rather to occupy it processually. I became fascinated by the notion of “camérer” developed by the French reform therapists, poets, and militant researchers in the lm group that formed around Fernand Deligny and Josée Manenti, because their cinematic gaze conveyed re ections that refuse objecti cation and behave transversally as subjects. In this way they captured the poetry of the image and integrated this form of seeing into the organization of observation or, as they expressed it, they inhabited their surroundings with their camera.

Every camera image is there before it is captured. It exists as a concept, as a possibility within the process and, in the therapeutic psycho-neurological landscape research of the Deligny cinema group, becomes the image of the rhizome. The viewer’s position as object-subject disappears as a result of duration. The act of seeing articulates its own involvement in the world and produces a perception of intermediate images. A camera eye that inhabits the world does not force the world into representation. It encounters events rather than seizing them; it does not hunt them down but positions itself within that which is recognizable. It creates points of connection within the framework of the complex, vital movements that in uence us. The moment of recording is more important to me than the technical means employed, because what is recognizable depends on my possibilities of action. The greater these possibilities, the more autonomously I can produce images. The “passage,” which for Walter Benjamin, in his analysis of Baudelaire’s poem “Á une passante,” was the signi er of modernity, seems to have somewhat lost its meaning in the presence of “facts.” But modernity is clamorous. It is mesmerizing, a machine trance indicating the slowness of time and, like the exo-view of our own cognitive perspectives, inviting us to move, to change position.

Image Transfer

In some of my works, passage is represented visually through the speed of a car journey (Timescapes, Corridor X, Unearthing Disaster). Conversations in cars, which connect us to the moving exterior during the journey, become the background to the statement. Corridor X (2006) integrates the moving background as a double-screen road movie of migrations between Germany and Turkey. On the former “autoput”—the “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” in former Yugoslavia—fellow travelers who have become friends discuss European expansion, which was promoted by the same countries that agreed on a corridor infrastructure policy and has supported neoliberal policies since the 1993 Maastricht treaty. Transport routes, energy pipelines, and telecommunications technologies in ten so-called European corridors are nanced by “privatepublic partnerships.” Financial and technical know-how are developed along the length of these corridors. Local, autonomous economies are dying out, as became evident after the Yugoslav Wars and later in the wake of the Greek nancial crisis. For this reason, there are lines of continuity between EU expansion policies and the imperial policies of the German Reich in the late nineteenth century.

The Orient Express and the connecting Baghdad Railway were built along the “old” European axis that linked Germany to the Ottoman Empire. This imperial policy moved in the opposite direction of the migration of workers to Western Europe. The collective video editing project Timescapes/B-Zone sought, with this in mind, to address issues of infrastructural politics and the new European subjectivities developed prior to the collapse of the socialist states after the Yugoslav Wars. The idea was to create a joint video database for ve artists/groups working between Germany and Turkey and to invite each participant to use images made by the other participants in their narratives. This process shows what an image, in the absence of knowledge of the context in which it was made, might represent to others. The group, which experimented and organized workshops together for more than two years, addressed these questions. I wanted to understand to what extent the interpretation of my own memory images, which precede the creation of the image itself, is collective, and if those memory images can be shared. This question preoccupied me after the completion of Passing Drama because, as a result of the way that time duration is shaped during editing, a “geo-psychic” viewpoint is always apparent. When all the works were nally shown in a joint exhibition, it became clear to me that our collective memory is, above all, geographically and culturally imprinted. This means that the in uence of the media and societal powers aimed at our brains, our memory, and our attention is a particular, political form of government (noopolitik), which in uences us so strongly, beyond revolutions and individual experiences, that even well-armed image creators are unable to defend themselves from their perspectives.

By employing collective, nonlinear editing, one can geographically coordinate a collective “geo-psyche,” that is, understand at a geographical level the cultural memory that in uences our interpretation of images. So it is a constructed memory. Perspectives within Europe, for example between Germany, the former Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey, have hardly changed since the Second World War. In the minds of its inhabitants, “Southeastern Europe” is still considered a “B-zone,” a second-class Europe where experiments with new political operations are conducted in times of crisis. Southeastern Europe sees Germany as the initiator of a new, totalitarian nancial capitalism laid on top of on the history of German imperialism.

In 2022, in our research project “Industries of Denial,” Kerstin Schroedinger and I positioned Europe’s contemporary noopolitik5 in two parallel movements. Against the rushing background of a train journey, the sort often used as rear projection in lms, we talk about the denial and the vestiges of the genocidal eradications in Turkey. We discuss the macropolitical, industrial construction of the Baghdad Railway as a historical project of late nineteenth-century German imperialism and, more generally, infrastructure as a megamachine in postdemocratic countries. We also examine the resilient, connective cultural forces that have managed to escape from these totalitarian governments, or that have become invisible but continue to contradict these narratives.

Kine=movement, so=soma=body

Thanks to the alienation mechanisms created by the camera eye, I have been able to emancipate myself from the prefabricated viewing habits, prejudices, and false ideas arising from cultural and

geographical stigmatization. The analysis of the volatility of image documents and the composition and superimposition of sequences are “geo-psychic,” analytic, and therapeutic procedures; they convey a time landscape or cinematic cartography of the interspace, between inside and outside, between movement and earth memory.

For this reason, I call my works cine(so)matic cartographies. They are self-organized decentralizing processes in which structures (assemblages) can move into one another. The replay of the recorded moment, the time block experience of a passage, a transversal cut that is subordinated neither to index nor to machine; these elements embody the development of our mechanically animated subjectivity.

These procedures are crucial for environmental policy and for migrational autonomy.

Migration is a persistent aspect of the construction of global, political relationships. It expresses itself beyond the democratic nation-state as a growing symptom of its political exclusions. For Francesc Tosquelles, the right to migrate was a human right. He believed that our thinking directly follows our physical movement. The border regime of the nation-state, which limits and regulates this right, then, is also a way to regulate our thinking. I think that the con ict between nomadic (migrant) and sedentary cultures, as outlined in A Thousand Plateaus, becomes the battle eld of noopolitik in migration. Deleuze and Guattari speci cally postulated a distinction between nomadism and migration. One is a movement with a beginning and an end (migration) and the other a movement without beginning or end (nomadism). This distinction, however, has been criticized as an “ahistorical” representation. The dictum of nomadism, “One never gets anywhere,” today constitutes the matrix of migratory ows.

In my four-channel video and sixteen-channel audio installation Crossings, created within the context of documenta 14 (2017), various crises in European politics in Greece after 2015 are concatenated to form a chaosmotic level of construction. Crossings composes a narrative that tells of war, forms of slavery past and present, and ecological catastrophes in the form of a cartography. This cartography crystallizes the quasi-schizophrenic, delirious conditions of the realities that arose during the Greek debt crisis. Neoliberal deregulations, nancial operations, migration crises, and environmental catastrophes nearly forced the Greek government into civil war against its own people. “ There is no mode of capitalist production that is not at the same time a mode of destruction,” asserts a voice in the spatially composed exhibition area.

The scenes include the closure of the borders between Greece and Macedonia in Idomeni in spring 2016 and the brutal eviction of refugees from the harbor of Piraeus, where a particularly vulnerable group of migrants had camped under the bridge of the highway. Trucks depart from ships there en route to the “Norths.” These images introduce the political history of the monetization of the economy in ancient Corinth. Money and debt is shown as producing an asymmetric power relationship that ensures the continuation of creditors ’ power over debtors through civil war “by other means.” From the stones of its ruins we shift our gaze to the disastrous image of a huge Canadian factory operating in the midst of the pristine Skouries

forest, extracting gold from Halkidiki in Northern Greece, transforming societies, cultures, and the natural world into an industrial wasteland. Eldorado Gold Corporation has already polluted the water and forest so much that basic economic commons for the inhabitants has been destroyed; futures are closed o once this factory nally opens. “They push me to think of terrorism,” a voice says.

A long traveling shot and voices in di erent languages appear, throwing terms like love, hate, envy, or jealousy over the fences and beautiful landscapes of Lesbos. In a schizoanalytical group session, a group of refugees performs a workshop enabling speech acts that express the a ective experiences of their passages. The Moria refugee camp. Unexpected scenes. Fire in the camp, revolt in Lesbos and Oreokastro near Thessaloníki, the desperate struggle in Halkidiki where citizens block the roads to the forest.

The Kurdish refugee camp in Lavrion near Athens is organized on the basis of the articulate political manifesto of a radical egalitarian organization. Daily life in the Kurdish camp is organized through music and dance. The same songs appear in scenes of war in the Kurdish areas in Turkey. The spleen of history made the harbor of Lavrion the meeting point between South and North, between future masters and prisoners of war, forced to become enslaved workers for the biggest silver mine in the classical Athenian period. Deconstructing the myth of democracy in ancient Athens with the slave rebellions in the ancient silver mines in Lavrion in the second century BCE directs us back to Skouries and the neocolonial enterprise of Eldorado Gold orchestrated with the economic fasttrack programs of the European Union and the privatization of public water in Greece.

What constitutes the narrative of the second part of the cartography of Crossings is the dark prospect of the economic recon guration of Northern Greece into an industrial wasteland for the mining of gold, metals, and rare earth minerals. This unwanted future has for years enraged the local populations. They deploy their bodies against special police forces.

War, destruction, and the experience of a traumatic neoliberal reality is transmitted from body to body, from generation to generation, generating countless voices. These voices are intertwined “chaosmotically”—they form new groups of expressions. They create a spirited and dynamic memory, become a refrain of resistance and countermobility, and newly actualize a ects and narratives that migrate back to the capitalist center of German industrial production. These voices work at dissolving the established history of progress from within.

The screens and loudspeaker in Crossings form a chain of scenes, create a doubled or tripled event space, and recover a threefold possibility of perception. A complex, dynamic spatial sound system encourages the observer to move physically in the space so that their gaze can wander from one visual event to the next.

In Crossings one experiences superimposed crises that render visible the autonomy of migrations in the globalized society of control. Migration movements form the inner borders of nation-states. The transnational politics of the so-called postliberal society is the outermost

limit of the nation-state. It reacts directly to a migratory autonomy that is constituted as a continuous, creative movement within social, cultural, and economic environments. Escape comes rst!6 People’s e orts to ee necessitate the reorganization of the controls themselves; control regimes have to react to the new situations created by ight. This e ect of refugee movements does not act as an opposition to the state but produces a new subjectivity that experiences passage as a process, within which new strategies of perception are tested. These constellations do not only pertain to movements of ight. They can also be understood as a subversive and invisible politics that undermines the borders and death politics of sovereign national governments. Rather than a political re ection on the autonomy of migration, there is an overpropagation of antiquated and moribund national-historical narratives. Classi cations and devaluations of migrant and political groups are fueled and new evaluations established that depoliticize the law. Subversive mobility strategies push the state to transform itself beyond existing social commitments. The mobility of migration thus becomes the determining force of the capitalist system. Crossings dialogues with the hypotheses of Francesc Tosquelles, seen in our work Déconnage. Tosquelles’s proclamation of the “human right to vagrancy” is reminiscent of the Marxist historical foundations of the struggle against capitalism and its attempts to immobilize the proletarianized, impoverished, vagrant masses using punitive measures. Tosquelles justi ed his demand for the human right to freedom of movement through his psychiatric research on psychomotor activity and the nervous system in the city of Reus. This “myokinetic” research demonstrated that the brain’s reactions follow the body’s movements in time. In other words, as Tosquelles expressed it, our thoughts always follow our feet. This translates into a political manifesto against the modern mind-body dichotomy. This psychiatric research in Reus laid the foundations for resistance against the mechanisms of standardization in psychiatry, against diagnoses and pathologization, against con nement. This is also the foundation for resistance against the racism and colonialism that characterize modernity. Perception can be determined by “setting foot” somewhere, and this changes our way of thinking. It is a means of resistance against mechanisms of control and their institutionalized organization.

Tosquelles’s analytical model of geo-psychiatry has been described by Brian Massumi as a work of migration. Later, Fernand Deligny would reevaluate the hiking trails of autistic youths in the harsh and desolate landscapes of the Cévennes and turn them into examples of an itinerant migrant work, which for me later became a cine(so)matic cartography or, inspired by Arantzazu Saratxaga, led me to concepts of the matrixial, to a cine-matrixial cojointness, to the connectivity of a transhuman and transmedial reality.7 Not only does machinic animism reverse the perspectives in the subject-object patterns of modernity, it is also open to totemic landscapes of knowledge; it is autopoietic.

Nonlinear lm editing has received little attention with regard to migration and cartographic work. For me, it is both a thought mechanism and an avant-garde model for minority languages through which one can describe the processes of the experience of passage and the geographic and historical milieus in migration. The space of possibility within migrational autonomy and contemporary activist artistic practices intervenes in the transformation of the sociopolitical landscape. It functions through connectivity as a machinic animus. Just as motion triggers the

shutter release on the camera, so machinic animism expresses an ancient promise that is ubiquitous in photographic and cinematic image production: everything is connected. Land, environment, landscape are not objective or measurable planes; they are formations of information that constitute a material context. The outside is not a geographic metric determined by Western science; it is dynamic. It is a moving formation between humans, nonhumans, animals, plants, skies, underworlds, seas, and landscapes, into which life is projected and where it is stored. The earth is an archive. It is relational, dynamic, psychic; the environment is a social, mental, and economic network. Nonmonotheistic cosmologies imply the possibility of a politics of the body, expanding into assemblages that enable alliances between human and nonhuman beings. These are potential alliances of an invisible politics and can be understood as political alliances. They grow into new milieus and force themselves into visibility.

[For] what makes us human is our body, not our soul. Our soul is the most common thing in the world [. . .] from the general base of humanity or soul, through that we can communicate with all entities of the world.8

Each camera eye harbors the experience of temporal realities as depending on unforeseen, hyperreal occurrences that determine its path. The production of electronic images is rst and foremost a constructive process. A recognizable ow of images emerges from electronic dots, lines, and elds—rather like with early video machines, which were able to produce video images only by means of complicated connections. Every panoramic vision is also an illusion seen from a xed viewpoint. To some extent, the panorama is a false or counterfeit overview of a totality (the landscape). Maybe the panorama should be considered more as a magical ensemble. Because in the panorama lies dormant the anodyne desire to have control (the overview) over something.

Matri Linear B is about revisions, about the shifts and scaling of information-processing techniques that examine perspectives of landscape and environment in order to reinterpret ideas of strati cation, geology, sediment, panorama, and surface through conceptions of past. Matri Linear B treats the expressive forces of the earth’s surface as “speaking landscapes,” as agencies of a statement, and examines how we can learn to see them anew; it addresses the relationship between the landscape, the beholder, and the cinematic and kinetic means of visualizing it (cinematography, satellite images, cartography, painting) as well as the scienti c methods of image production (archaeology, anthropology). In a continuation of my work with cine(so)matic cartographies, in which bodies of movement and crossings of places create mnemonic milieus, I focus here on the movement of the camera eye within the landscape image itself. I also investigate the function of the panoramic image in the technical processes involved in the industrialization of agriculture.

Satellite images of the earth’s surface, which are central to the organization of industrial landscapes, are panoramic. They are objectifying algorithms that also operate at the heart of environmental politics. They smooth out the complex, varying perceptions and ecologies of other observed living beings in the environment. Or, to put it more radically, with these forms of objectifying the visibility of the world, the exo-plane of ourselves is emptied.

To change our understanding of the environment, we should multiply the heterogeneity of the actors in the eld and the implementation of their reasoning as much as possible. We need to engage in complex thinking with situated agencies. If we are to avoid the misunderstandings of environmental expertise, the power that prede nes what becomes visible must be heterogeneous. It must guarantee the perspectival diversity of the percipience of many bodily eyes, as Viveiros de Castro notes, and bring the joint process of percipience of endo- and exo-realities from di erent time structures into the expressive mechanism of our present. One must therefore actualize a cosmic thinking in which “soul” and “mechanism” exist everywhere at the same time—in the in nitely small as well as in the in nitely large. Multivalue, multiperspectival subjectivities condition the possibility of a cosmic thinking and a cosmic politics, which, I think, enable the present to begin.

Endnotes

(1) Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 87–88.

(2) Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896).

(3) Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (New York: Random House, 1997), 210.

(4) Editor’s note: This is a translation of part of a quotation in German that appears on the memorial to Walter Benjamin in Portbou. The full quotation reads: “It is harder to honor the memory of the nameless than that of the famous. Historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the nameless.”

(5) Maurizio Lazzarato, “Was ist die Noo Politik,” unpublished.

(6) Dimitri Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 16.

(7) For more on the concept of the matrixial, see Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi, “When the Camera Eye Descends into the Deep Earth and Speaks in the Language of Participation: Matrixial Weaving for Political Autonomy,” Angela Melitopoulos. Cine(so)matrix, (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2023), 184.

(8) Eduardo Viveiros de Castro on the animistic societies of the Araweté people in Brazil, in Assemblages, 2010.

Unearthing Disaster I

By Angela Melitopoulos and Angela Anderson

Two-channel video and ve-channel audio installation, 36 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 4:3

VO Italian, English, German

Subtitles available in English and Spanish

Former title: Postscript to an Un nished Journey

In 2013, for the last part of the double-screen road movie Corridor X, Angela Melitopoulos and Angela Anderson visited the region of Halkidiki in northeastern Greece and began documenting the environmental and social damage in icted on the pristine forests of the SkouriesKakavos Mountains by the construction of a massive open-pit gold mine by the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold. The two-channel video installation Unearthing Disaster I captures the literal pulverization of the natural and cultural environment and its social form of expression in this territory.

Economically, the region is largely dependent on tourism, farming, beekeeping, and shing, and the construction of this mine violently threatens the abundant, delicate, and biodiverse ecosystem of this magni cent natural landscape upon which this economy relies. The existential struggles of the local communities against this catastrophe have unearthed the undemocratic, extra-state strategies of the multinational extraction industry in a moment when the Greek state was forced to implement economic austerity measures, including privatization and so-called fast-track investment programs mandated as a response to the EU debt crisis. In 2013, the protests capture the voices of citizens whose futures have been suspended and are at risk of being erased for a modern-day colonial, high-tech pro t machine producing gold needed for nothing but stock exchange value. The protest movements in Halkidiki show that our future is bound to a global political struggle for an ecology that recognizes the interconnectedness of the environmental, social, cultural, economic, and ethical aspects of society.

Unearthing Disaster I accompanies local activists on a journey through their once-familiar landscape, transformed in a matter of days by the antiproductive forces of capitalism into something they no longer recognize. Through the course of this journey, the scale of the imminent disaster unfolds through stories about millions of trees cut down, the clean water that is disappearing from the mountain, local politicians” sellout of the region, the violent repression of the social movement formed to prevent the destruction of the natural environment by the police and private security, and encounters with workers who violently defend the shortsighted nature of their employment.

In 2015, Unearthing Disaster II, a second part of the project, was recorded and marks the moment of hope after the election of the Syriza government, which would sadly give way to disillusionment in the years after.

The Cell. Antonio Negri and the Prison

By Angela Melitopoulos

Four-channel video installation on CRT monitors and stereo sound on headphones, 121 mins. Color, aspect ratio 4:3

VO German, French, Italian

Subtitles available in English, Italian, German, and Spanish

The project was initially published as an interactive DVD project structured in four interlinked chapters:

Prologue, 18 mins.

Exile – Paris, 1997, 10 mins. (Interview by Maurizio Lazzarato and Ra aele Ventura)

Prison – Rebibbia, 1998, 46 mins.

Home detention – Rome, 2003, 47 mins.

«public» the capital construction in Skouries. mining and the mine. mine is allowed

11 MARCH 2011

While 700 miners demonstrate in the village of Paleochori, 80 antimining protesters from Megali Panagia gather at Chondro Dendro, the entrance of the forest road leading to Skouries. Later that day, two young anti-mining protesters are attacked by miners in Neochori hanging posters for an anti-mine demonstration in Ierissos. Police arrest three other anti-mining protesters during this incident.

Miners gather at the police station in Arnea where the arrested were taken and threaten to burn down the antimining watch post in the mountain. An SOS call is issued by anti-mine activists. 50 people respond and stay over night at their watch post in Skouries.

13 MARCH 2011

3000 People demonstrate against mining in Ierissos.

8 JULY 2011

Three days after taking office, the new Minister of Environment, Climate & Energy Giorgos Papaconstandinou (Pasok) signs the 3000 page Environmental Impact Study submitted by European Goldfields, allowing the construction of the mine to begin.

24 FEBRUARY 2012

Vancouver-based Eldorado Gold buys 95% of European Goldfields in shares, Aktor keeps their 5% of the shares.

7 MARCH 2012

A regional meeting entitled «Northern Greece Against Gold Mining» is held in Megali Panagia with anti-mining committees from Kilkis, Thrace, and Halkidiki – all areas of future Eldorado Gold mining projects. 20 miners gather outside of the theater and fights break out between the miners and anti-mine activists.

18 MARCH 2012

The Forest Agency plows the road to Skouries and the activist’s watch post.

19 MARCH 2012

Two cars from the Archaeological Authority are seen coming from Skouries after surveying for archeological findings that could hinder the mining project. An emergency assembly is held in Megali Panagia and 5 people spend the night in the watch post.

20 MARCH 2012

30 anti-mining activists join the 5 activists in the mountain and block 4 cars of archeologists from reaching Skouries. Eldorado Gold’s Greek subsidiary Hellas Gold calls prospective workers to go immediately to Chondo Dendro. 500 miners in trucks and cars drive to the watch post where 35 protestors were waiting with 4 police. Fighting breaks out between the workers and the activists. The workers destroy the house. That night people occupied the municipal building in Ierissos for the next 3 days. Decision is taken to go to the mountain on Mar 25.

25 MARCH 2012

The first demonstration up to the mountain. 2000 people gather at Chondro Dendro, the entrance to the forest road 7km from Skouries, and are met by 400 riot police firing teargas.

30 MARCH 2012

WINTER 2011

Heavy snowfall hinders anti-mining activists from reaching their watch post in the mountain.

People protest inside and outside of the Aristotle municipality meeting in Ierissos. The mayor Chr. Pachtas car is burned and there is a battle with the police. From then on Pachtas holds meetings in Arnea with security guarding him. He personally sues 36 people from the municipality for hostage taking and possession of explosives in connection with this incident.

APRIL 2012

Mining company hires private security. Cameras and actual workers are installed in the trees to monitor the protest movement.

5 AUGUST 2012 1000 people demonstrate against the mine at Chondro Dendro. Riot police fire plastic projectiles and teargas directly at protesters. The fight between police and activists lasts for 8 hours.

8 SEPTEMBER 2012

3500 people demonstrate in Thessaloniki against the mine. This was the first anti-mine demonstration covered by international media.

9 SEPTEMBER 2012 2500 anti-mine activists walk to Skouries from Ierissos. Police fire teargas at them and use helicopters for the first time. 4 people are arrested and 6 people are charged after the fact.

21 OCTOBER 2012 One of the most violent anti-mine demonstrations on behalf of the police. Chaos breaks out as a large group of almost 2000 anti-mine protestors are chased 6km by riot police from Skouries to Chondro Dendro, where 300 activists are gathered. Police attack the retreating mass from all sides with teargas and batons. 14 protestors are arrested, police break one person’s leg, and two 4x4 vehicles used by the antimine movement is confiscated by the police. During this incident, miners were gathered behind the police line in the direction of Paleochori.

4 NOVEMBER 2012

7000 people protest in Thessaloniki against mining projects in Halkidiki, Kilkis, and Thrace.

24 NOVEMBER 2012

Anti-mine activists from Halkidiki, Thrace and Kilkis deliver a protest letter to the Canadian Ambassador in Athens and the Canadian Consulate in Thessaloniki.

12 JANUARY 2013

Demonstration in Athens against the destruction of Halkidiki by mining.

13 JANUARY 2013

Public event entitled “Impact of the Expansion and Operation of Gold Mines” held in Polygros with university professors from Thessaloniki.

17 FEBRUARY 2013

Arson attack on the Eldorado processing factory construction site causing damage to machines, trucks and office containers.

18 FEBRUARY 2013 20 police enter and arrest activists suspected of arson in Megali Panagia and bring them to the police station in Polygyros, where they forcibly take DNA samples.

24 FEBRUARY 2013

Police take 10 people from Ierissos and 2 people from Uranopoli into custody. During the following weeks police round up people from Ierissos in groups several times.

7 MARCH 2013

Several hundred riot police and elite anti-terrorism units invade Ierissos, firing teargas and flash grenades in order to search the houses of 4 people suspected to have participated in the arson attack. Teargas fills the school in the middle of the school day.

9 MARCH 2013

More than 12,000 people demonstrate in Thessaloniki against the mine and police repression. Media attention increases exponentially after the Ierissos invasion.

5 APRIL 2013

3000 people attend a solidarity concert in Thessaloniki to raise awareness and money for legal costs.

8 APRIL 2013

Eldorado Gold invites famous Greek journalists to visit their mining projects in Skouries and in Kisladag, Turkey. Activists from around Halkidiki block the road at Chondro Dendro Hundreds of riot police block the road to Megali Panagia, preventing the arrival of protestors from Ierissos. Mine workers from other villages gather in Paleochori and march to Megali Panagia, where they throw stones at the activists and police fire stun grenades. 200 Miners enter Megali Panagia and go to the village square. As night falls, activists from Megali Panagia attempt to return home and are confronted by miners until riot police intervene. 10 miners and their mothers sued 6 activists for swearing and assault during this incident.

APRIL 2013

10 JULY 2013

2 more people from Ierissos are imprisoned for the arson attack. People from Megali Panagia block the road to Paleochori for many hours, fighting with riot police until 2am.

15 JULY 2013

Clear cutting of the forest in Karatzas begins to make way for construction of the first tailings dam.

9 APRIL 2013

2 people are arrested in Ierissos on suspicion of having participated in the arson attack and held in remand in prison.

12 MAY 2013

500 locals protest in Skouries and Karatzas. A group of 50 women went to Skouries where 3 were arrested. A group of men battled police in Karatzas, who again used helicopters.

2 JUNE 2013

Canadian author Naomi Klein joins anti-mining activists surveying environmental damage in Skouries. On their way back from Skouries they are met by riot police.

Protest against the arrests in Polygyros. Miners block the road in Paleochori, preventing the return of the local activists. Violent clashes erupt with several injured from both sides. The conflict was very personal, with relatives, friends and neighbors fighting with each other.

7 AUGUST 2013

5000 people protest mining in Thrace.

29 AUGUST 2013

The mayor of the region of Aristotle

Chr. Pachtas announces that the drinking water of the village of Neochori is polluted with arsenic and cannot be used. Mining activity is cited as the cause, but no one is held accountable.

7 SEPTEMBER 2013

Large anti-mining demonstration in Thessaloniki during the Expo. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras promises to defend Eldorado Gold’s interests with ‘all means’.

14 OCTOBER 2013

4 prisoners from Ierissos are released from pre-trial detention.

24-26 NOVEMBER 2013

Three days of actions at Chondro Dendro by activists from Megali Panagia. Hellas Gold workers begin fencing off forest without permission.

WINTER 2013-4

Weekly survey and documentation of environmental damages by antimine activists and weekly actions at Chondro Dendro to prevent the company from entering the mountain and from widening the forest road. Criminalization of participants of these protest actions.

JANUARY 2014

Hundreds

FEBRUARY 2014

More

FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

10 JANUARY 2015

After the president of Hellas Gold publically wishes the residents of Aristotle “Happy Building”, activists from Megali Panagia construct a brick wall across the road at Chondro Dendro, blocking the entrance to the mountain for several hours.

25 JANUARY 2015

Syriza wins elections in Greece. Eldorado Gold’s share price falls.

15 FEBRUAR 2015

Demonstration in Skouries for the immediate halt of the mining project. Miners hold a counter-demonstration for ‘our life, our salaries, our dignity’. Police use buses to block road at Chondro Dendro, preventing 500 activists from reaching Skouries but they allow the miners to pass.

26 FEBRUAR 2015

8

JULY

22-31 AUGUST 2014

actions. More then 500 people participate.

27 SEPTEMBER 2014

12,000 people attend a solidarity concert in Ierissos.

The Minister of Environment and Energy Panagiotis Lafazanis withdraws the construction permit of the Eldorado Gold processing plant and the permit to cut old growth forest in Karatzas.

20 MARCH 2015

300 anti-mining activists prevented from reaching Chondro Dendro by riot police and miners. Protestors take alternative route through the forest to the Skouries open pit and are met by at least 300 riot police with local and undercover police who fire teargas. One person was briefly arrested.

29 MARCH 2015

More than 10,000 people demonstrate in Thessaloniki against the mine and for a sustainable future.

5 APRIL 2015

Miners announced the third “antidemo” in response to an anti-mine demonstration. 200 workers and police forces attacked 40 protesters. Workers threw stones and police fired teargas at Chondro Dendro. 1000 other activists from around Halkidiki who wanted to join the 40 at Chondro Dendro were blocked by riot police in Megali Panagia.

16 APRIL 2015

Around 2000 miners travel to Athens to protest for their jobs. 4000 people hold an anti-mining demonstration in Athens the same day. The miners are characterized by the mass media as fighting for their jobs and their families. The counter protest is characterized as being organized by black block anarchists.

21 APRIL 2015

Peruvian anti-mining activist Hugo Blanco visits Megali Panagia and records a radio show for www.radio-schizoanalytique.net.

10 MAY 2015

1000 people protest against gold mining in Stavros.

22 MAY 2015

100 activists from Megali Panagia hand a protest letter to the Canadian Consulate in Thessaloniki.

JUNE 2015

In Athens, 500 people demonstrate outside of the Ministry of the Environment, while members of every anti-mining committee in Halkidiki and Thessaloniki meet with the Ministers of Justice, of Citizen Protection, and of the Environment. The same day, the administrative court holds hearings on two cases against the mine and seven cases in favor of the mine.

Three video interviews and a prologue with the philosopher Antonio Negri before, during, and after his last period of incarceration in Rebibbia prison in Rome form an interlinked survey of Negri’s resistance and activism in the prison cell.

The chapters are connected with a programmed hyperlink structure so that one can follow Negri’s ideas from before his time in prison, to when he was imprisoned, and after.

Antonio Negri was a professor of political science in Padua. Considered the charismatic doyen of the Italian radical Left, in 1979 he was falsely accused of leading the Red Brigades and of conspiring to plot the murder of Aldo Moros. Though Negri was taken into custody, he was later cleared of these charges during a protracted legal process that lasted for many years. Prior to his trial, his immunity as an elected representative of the Radical Party in the Italian Parliament allowed him to leave prison. When the Italian government rescinded his immunity shortly thereafter, Negri ed to Paris, where he stayed until 1997. Under reactionary, repressive “special” laws against terrorism, Negri was then found guilty of “armed revolt against the authority of the state.”

The questionable proceedings against a young and critical generation in Italy (with over 60,000 arrests of political activists) was met with strong criticism by many European nations. Between 1979 and 1983, thousands of Italians left the country, especially for France, where they were granted political asylum. Today, there are still many “exiles” who continue to live in Paris.

After fourteen years in Paris, Antonio Negri willingly returned to Italy and was immediately incarcerated in Rebibbia. Shortly before his return, in an interview entitled “Back to the Future,” Negri declared the event “the end of the years of lead.” His decision to repatriate was intensely discussed in the international media. Later, in 2000, Negri attracted more attention with the publication of Empire (cowritten with Michael Hardt, 2001), which o ers a critique of global capitalism and proposes alternative modes of thought and action. Negri rejected the freedom of exile in exchange for prison as a means to regain his legal freedom as a citizen.

Today Antonio Negri is free. In these interviews he describes forms of mental resistance in today’s penal system and how he was able to transform the prison cell into a space for intellectual work. He recounts many examples how the “cell of resistance” from which he wrote and operated in the 1970s became a “cell of peace.”

Déconnage 2012

By Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato

Archival survey, single-channel video installation with light-window as archive table with books, 100 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 16:9

VO French, German

Subtitles available in English, Catalan, and Spanish

The original interview was recorded by François Pain, Jean-Claude Polack, and Danièlle Sivadon for the documentary lm François Tosquelles: une politique de la folie realized by François Pain in 1989

* Work not exhibited in Angela Melitiopoulos. Cine(so)matrix exhibition (Museo Reina Sofía, 2023). This work has formed part of the Museum’s Collection since 2018, and it was exhibited in Francesc Tosquelles. Like a Sewing Machine in a Wheat Field (Museo Reina Sofía, 2022).

This installation, about the Catalan anarcho-syndicalist psychiatrist and resistance ghter Francesc Tosquelles, was conceived as an interlinked archival survey in experimental audiovisual form. It narrates the beginnings of the institutional psychotherapy invented in the psychiatric asylum of SaintAlban-sur-Limagnole in the Lozère department in southern France during the Second World War.

In 1985 a video interview with Tosquelles was lmed by Jean-Claude Polack, François Pain, and Danièlle Sivadon over a period of three days. Outside of his text publications, this interview constitutes perhaps the most important attempt to record and trace his knowledge. The aesthetic conception of the video installation Déconnage deepens and re ects Tosquelles’s extra-analytical methods in psychoanalysis, which he described as “fooling around”—a form of nonverbal association and intervention.

Déconnage introduces an artistic proposal for a digital cartography within a deferred conversation. The work expands Tosquelles’s interview from 1985 by introducing new commentaries in the following way: In 2011, philosopher Elisabeth von Samsonow (Vienna) and psychiatrist Jean-Claude Polack (Paris) were shown forty- ve-minute video excerpts that were edited from the raw footage of the 1985 interview with Tosquelles. While listening to this edited speech, they were given permission to hit pause on the video player and interrupt his narrative whenever they wanted. Whenever they paused, they could start speaking and interjecting their thoughts and comments on his ideas or elaborating on them. In the video installation, these three moments are interlinked; Tosquelles’s interview is revised anew and positioned within a contemporary perspective through a side-by-side montage. The setting resembles a virtual philosophical-psychoanalytic session that is triggered by the respondents” psychomotor reactions. Their annotations focus on his biography, his institutional psychotherapy practice in Saint-Alban, the role and function of a then newly designed institution for psychiatry, his cultural and territorial conception of locality, and the connection between social (Marx) and mental (Freud) alienation.

This method refers to the concept of machinic animism as an analytical tool to render the extralingual connectivity triggered in the speech act. The links, clicks, shots, and cuts in the editing become cartographic elements, making the switch from a conversation to an archival survey of moving images to another conversation and so forth. In this way, all participants are part of this collective editing and thereby directing our thinking.

Déconnage is the third part of Melitopoulos’s audiovisual research in collaboration with Maurizio Lazzarato about Félix Guattari and the concept of machinic animism.

The Civil War involves, above all, a change of perspective in the world.

This was closely linked to the non-homogeneity of the I.

I’m going to stop here to consider the idea that we’re composed of fragments.

If you want to see psychosis as a dynamic phenomenon, as a schizophrenic process,

you have to abandon the pre-conceived notion of it being structured by childhood experiences.

In fact, there's a lot less neurosis in wartime and fewer psychosis are cured.

The neurotic suffers a lot more in civilian life.

In times of war, people abandon their inner war and suffer less from it.

Psychiatry involves an anti-culture, a culture with a different viewpoint.

It's perfect: "I’m angry, I take a pill to calm down and then another to liven myself up again"

Who benefits in the end?

The pharmaceutical industry.

The Refrain

By Angela Melitopoulos

In collaboration with Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela Anderson, and Ana Hanabusa

Four-channel video and eight-channel audio installation with archival table, 66 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 16:9

VO Japanese, Korean, English

Subtitles available in English, Korean, and Spanish

A refrain consists of sound, words, gestures, signs, images that turn back on themselves, restart themselves, repeat themselves, and through their repetition they capture, intensify, and give consistency to the forces and a ects of the cosmos.

This four-channel video installation visualizes a cartography of long-standing resistance movements against the militarization under the military umbrella reaching from Korea to Japan along the Ryukyu Islands to Taiwan. The islands of Okinawa (Japan) and Jeju (Korea) are the most important islands on this strategic curve mirroring the Chinese coastline. They are occupied by US bases, or—as they are now de ned—joint Japanese–US and Korean–US bases.

The postwar history of Okinawa and Jeju triggered a strong antiwar and peace movement in the East Chinese Sea, pleading for demilitarization and decolonization and calling for a transnational protest against the current intensi cation of an industrialized militarization of the archipelago. Protests are organized in the form a daily presentation of musical performances that take place in front of the heavily guarded military bases.

In fteen refrains recorded on Jeju Island, in Paju, Seoul, and Uijeongbu in Korea and on Okinawa and Iwai Island in Japan, The Refrain focuses on these performances and the social function of music in the islanders” societies. Memory and collectivity are constructed in songs sung while working the land, farming, and harvesting by reactivating premodern cosmologies and calling for actual decolonization.

“The

themselves, and through their repetition capture,

vibrations, or decompositions,

Gangjeong village, Jeju, Korea, 2014

Naval base construction site, Gangjeong village, Jeju, Korea, 2015

Future airstrip construction site, Henoko Beach, Okinawa, 2015

refrain is a prism, a crystal of space-time. It acts upon that which surrounds it, sound or light, extracting from it various

“The refrain consists of sound, words, gestures, signs, images which return on themselves, restart themselves, repeat capture, intensify and give consistency to the forces and affects of the cosmos.”

transformations.”

Henoko Beach, Okinawa, Japan, 2015

THE CONTINUITY OF A THOUGHT

Maurizio Lazzarato

The foundations of Angela Melitopoulos’s artistic work have been established since the beginning. In the 1990s, through her practice of shooting and editing, she developed a theoretical viewpoint on image and video technique that was born of a comparison with technique, aesthetic, and videoimage work in cinema.

Her conception of the image is very original and seems to allude to the rst chapter of Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory)1 by Henri Bergson, where he writes that the world is composed of an in nite multiplicity of uxes in which it is impossible to di erentiate between matter, energy, and light. Within this world the uxes intersect, overlap, compose, and decompose. Only an interval, a stop, can make them visible as images.

It is worth returning to an interview I conducted with her in 1995, in which she summarizes the practical and theoretical results of her work in the rst half of the 1990s. My book Video loso a (Videophilosophy),2 of which she is e ectively coauthor, was based on these conversations and on her work.

In video, movement is light. It is produced by the electronic structure of the image, its grains, its lines, its frame. Video is directly linked to light because it is a transformation and a codi cation of light through the intermediary of a technology. Movement exists only through these interplays of electronic luminances. One can have images that are xed, very static and yet very mobile.

With her video technique, Angela reveals an atomic, molecular movement that imposes a new perception, a new sensibility, as well as approaches to camerawork and editing that are necessarily di erent from cinema. The image, as it is normally conceived, is in reality a representation under which lie movements, vibrations, and velocities that compose it, traverse it, and enable it to exist. They are movements, vibrations, and velocities that human consciousness cannot capture. It is

the body that feels and perceives them. Angela pursues, with her camerawork and editing, the molecular dimension theorized in the philosophies of the 1970s (the micropolitics of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault’s microphysics of power).

Within objects there are movements, frequencies, atoms, energy. Video permits one to have a di erent perception of these energetic objects, and so to discover a di erent reality. Reality is a matter of perception. What is called reality is a convention on which most people are in agreement. Because what one perceives changes constantly. [. . .] I do not work with the sequence of shots, I work with light. If I fail, it is because I have fallen back into cinematic patterns. It was by working with video that I discovered this type of movement.

This molecular conception of the image and of the world is not just an ontology: it is to conceive of beings through these micromovements, through their vibration, and so to think of them as being in continuous variation, in a process of emergence. It is also, and immediately, a politics, a micropolitics. Angela shows a syntony, a correspondence between her existential condition (belonging to various minorities, being a Greek immigrant on her father’s side, being a woman) and the technical tool, the way of thinking and working with video. The molecular and the emergent are present both in the lives of minorities and in the technique. In any case, this is how she perceives, conceives, and uses it. This transition is very important, and her subsequent work, which seems to move away from “video art” toward more politically engaged work, is not a rupture but a continuity. Molecular in the image, molecular in politics. Micropolitical in the way of lming and editing, micropolitics of minorities.

Rather than speaking of editing, which is a cinematic concept, she prefers the term process

The world is not what is, but what happens, it is more an event than it is a fact or a thing. The world is in a constant state of emergence, meaning that it constructs itself; that emergence is a kind of production. The world is not already there, it is “process.” It is a process that is in the act of accomplishment, that is, of composing and decomposing the world that is composed of a multiplicity of humans and nonhumans. This way of regarding the world not as a whole but as something fragmented, composed of bits, pieces, segments, whose composition remains to be carried out, whose construction is an ongoing process, is very close to US pragmatism (William James). The time of this process is the present that grows upon itself.

Video is more about collage, about deconstruction/construction. It’s not even that. All I do is to clothe my gaze with electronic technical means. I highlight it and structure it. But it is not only my gaze, because it is crossed by the gaze of others. It is a gaze of events. Better said, I clothe an event. This is not an evident, banal event but a temporal event. It is not something optical but an event of time and movement, an encounter. The event does not concern the surface of the images. The most important thing is how you bring a way of reading, a gaze, into this. If you want to lm the surface you never capture anything. This is what television does with reporting, but it doesn’t achieve anything because there is no work on temporality or on electronics. There is a cinematographic conception of the image, or rather a false conception of the cinematographic image. One can’t capture events in that way. Events are something else.

Later, she used the simile of weaving to explain how video functions and her way of working: it’s like weaving, like arranging uxes rather than cotton thread or wool. Fluxes that cross one another, and knots that constitute the point where these uxes, through their encounters, give rise to an image. The latter is not only a stopping point but also the moment when other uxes can depart. The world is an immense canvas that is in a continuous process of being woven and unwoven. This also brings us back to the patchwork of pragmatism.

2.

The motor of Angela’s artistic work is desire, which passes, which is constructed, which is expressed in conjunction with the “work” of the machine. In this respect, too, she is in complete harmony with the philosophies of the 1960s and 1970s, because this is a mechanical desire arranged by social, political, and aesthetic machines. Desire is not something organic, it is not a property of the individual. As Deleuze and Guattari said, there is no essence of desire; on the contrary, desire is always constructed, it always emerges from a multiplicity of components, human and nonhuman: desire is always a social, political and aesthetic construction, and not the expression of an impulse.Only in liaison with the machine can Angela grasp and understand desire, because it is not an interiority that must be exteriorized to be expressed. It always comes from “without,” it is always an encounter with the “outside.”

There are close relationships between my desire and the possibility of using a machine. They are very close, too close. Sometimes it’s frightening. I would say that it is through the machine that you understand your desire, and also how this desire is constructed by other machines. So you enter your position and locate yourself. You can decode the imaginations that come to you, the mechanical imaginations (production of texts, sounds, images, such as advertising, for example) that a ect you. Like a ections,3 it always comes from outside

The machine also enables me to understand my way of creating my desire, to perceive its a ectations . . . No doubt I would have access to it through other creative processes, but I have always had connections with this tool. If I had been a painter . . . but painters are not in this mechanical relationship.

In order to be able to apprehend the concept of the machine as a source of subjectivity, to be able to comprehend an “object” (in what Western tradition de nes as an object) as something “living,” we need to introduce a new concept of the machine.

The conception of the machine expressed by Angela in the interview is very close to the position of Gilbert Simondon. The machine, as a “technical individual,” is not a thing, a simple object, nor is it an objectivation of human activity. It is a “mode of existence,” which is additional and parallel to the human mode of existence (neither of these terms can function autonomously, independent of the other). “Mode of existence” signi es that the machine is not an “absolute unity,” a “closed block,” a “substance,” that is, a “thing” that is already individuated, already “ nished,” completed and

therefore “dead.” The machine is open in di erent ways because it is relation and the multiplicity of relations: relation to its own components, relations to other machines, relation to the world (the environment) and to man. This technical being, according to Simondon, is the relation. It “resides in the fact that the relation has the value of being: it has a doubly genetic function, towards man and towards the machine,” whereas even in contemporary critical thought “machine and man are already entirely constituted and de ned.”4 Like Simondon, Angela never treats man and machine as essences that each exist independently. Man and machine constitute an arrangement and therefore a range of possibilities, of virtualities, which are modernized and di erentiated by artistic work. If the machine is open, if the machine is relation, it contains a “margin of indeterminacy,” and its individuation is not given once and for all because its functioning is adaptable, not rigidly constituted like that of automatons which, for this reason, represent an inferior type of technology.

Secondly, the machine is not immune to desire, because desire is not anthropomorphic. Desire emerges from technical machines and social machines at the crossing point of their arrangement. This conception of desire implies a new concept of “subjectivity.” One cannot conceive of human subjectivity without the intervention of nonhuman sources of subjectivation. Angela undertakes a displacement of subjectivity, in the sense that it is not necessary to identify subjectivity with the human. There are vectors of subjectivation in objects, in living things, in the landscape, in technical machines, in animals. And to work on animism is a logical continuation of this nonanthropomorphic conception of subjectivity. This animism can be described as mechanical, because the soul is always the fruit of arrangements, assemblies, construction processes.

From this new concept of machine and of subjectivity, an unprecedented process of subjectivation emerges.

So I used a machine that helps me to preserve, to have imprints, to construct a subjectivity that does not become alienated within social roles that have no link to my desire, to my experience. I thought that the camera could give me something objective, stable, solid, but I realized that it could only give me an imprint. This imprint has to be worked on because it is coded by something that has existed, a certain light. But as an imprint, it triggers a process of subjectivation.

3.

“What is essential in video is temporality.” Angela here echoes an a rmation by Nam June Paik, an important gure in her artistic training, who stated that video is time. The video image corresponds perfectly to time, which is change, which is continuous creation, otherwise it is nothing at all, as Henri Bergson said. The image is not a representation of something, it is itself, just as time it is an ontological force. Its movement is the same as that of time.

The centrality of time can be found both in aesthetics and in politics, particularly those of minorities. The way that minorities think and act de nes an aesthetic and a politics that di er radically from an aesthetic and a politics of the majority, rst and foremost in terms of time.

Minorities and the majority exist in two distinct temporalities. The majority lives in a continuous time, in a linear succession of times: the past, which determines the present, and the present, which goes toward the future. The present has no consistency, since it is experienced as a condition of the future, like a vector for what is to come (l’à-venir).5 The present is merely a moment of passage, just as in the Christian tradition the present life is only a passage to the other world.

Minorities do not live in this secularization of religious time in which the present is a moment of transition but in a discontinuous time composed of events, of encounters. The event is not a simple result of causal series that determine it to be this way or that, it is not only the realization of something preexisting; it opens the way to other possibilities that were unimaginable before their creation. Minorities live in the present as a time that is in the process of construction. The past and the future are two dimensions of this construction, which is taking place in the present.

The past is not that which is completely over, and the future is not what is going to happen; they are pieces and segments that coexist in a world that is being made in the present. All con dence is invested in the present, in its movement of destruction and creation.

These attributes of minorities are perfectly expressed by the migrants and the migrations on which Angela has worked a great deal. One could adapt Walter Benjamin’s excellent phrase to describe the condition of migrants because migrations incite them “to pick up again from the beginning, to start from scratch, to make do with little, to construct with almost nothing.”6

Migrations proceed in leaps, in ruptures, and in discontinuities in time and space. The migrant is faced with the unpredictable, the unknown, the nonprogrammable, with that which cannot be clearly anticipated. Migrations do not trace the shortest line from one point to another but are made up of detours, deviations, and unpredictable bifurcations.

The man of the majority is obsessed by security, the sagacious organization of life, the scheduling of time, and the striation of space. Time and space are already determined, and majority man moves within their coordinates. Migrants make time and make space at the same time as they act and move. This sensibility attuned to the unpredictability of the time of events, to the nonprogrammable aspect of the encounter, to the action that is performed with little, with almost nothing, the con dence in the present of a movement that is in the process of occurring, in the process rather than the result, in the journey rather than the destination—all this we nd in Angela’s work.

What is important to me is the encounter between movements that come from me and movements that come from somebody else. It is an encounter of events. One might think it is accidental, but this is not the case, because it is linked to the organization of a space, to a way of thinking, to a way of life. [. . .] In general, the cinematic image is thought out and constructed in advance. That doesn’t interest me. I prefer to plunge into things that are not planned, into situations that are not the result of a sole intellectual imagination but are constructed through an encounter between di erent imaginations. Video, in my practice,

MAURIZIO LAZZARATO

is not the work of an author manufacturing an image for which everyone has to line up in front of the camera. I work within a space where many other ideas circulate. I am one person among the others. I do not completely control the situation. What I do control is the encounter of events between all these intellectual or physical ideas, between di erent physical or virtual movements.

This translation of the experience of minorities into “aesthetics” undermines centralization and the role of the author. The individualism of the director cannot capture the microphysical dynamics of the world and of the molecular image composed and decomposed by multiplicity. But neither is it simply a collective work. It is more about an encounter, and arrangement of singularities.

I nd that more interesting. The author’s perspective bores me a great deal, especially in contemporary cinema. Contemporary cinema never manages to break with the dominant roles, which are clichés that correspond to nothing and which have nothing to do with our fragmented reality. The characters are not relevant to us, they express archetypes that no longer even exist. We don’t have a role to play, we are a multiplicity of roles.

According to the philosophy of Deleuze, thought is not primary, it is not a natural and spontaneous phenomenon. A shock, an encounter with the outside is required in order for it to occur. A rupture, a trauma is needed to put thought into motion. The image in Angela’s work also proceeds from a shock, from a trauma. The shock, the trauma is not principally aesthetic but rather existential and political. It is the personal trauma of being from a family that is both German and Greek and the historical shock that her grandparents and her father experienced as part of the Greek minority in Turkey at the time of the constitution of the nation-state following the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The shock is that of the events of the First World War, which defeated European empires but also its colonial empires. The First World War created the phenomenon of refugees, of the displacement of populations, and also the genocide of minorities within nation-states, such as in Turkey. The First World War is still the matrix of contemporary history. It is because of it that the “national” minorities, the displacements of populations, refugees, take on political importance.

I wander through these places—Turkey, Greece, Austria, and Germany—which a branch of my family has traveled through. I begin lming, and this leads to a process that is in uenced by the oral story and by the fractions of images that belong to me. The story is completely fragmented. It is neither true nor false because it is unveri able. Unveri able from both sides, because I also meet Turks (historians, journalists) who recount a history that has nothing to do with the other one, an o cial history that does not correspond to what I know about the genocide. My memories are caught up between a fragmented mythology, inherited from my family, and the history of the Turkish nation-state.

The shock, the trauma, does not give rise to a process of victimization. Rather than making one see oneself as a victim, the shock lends power and strength to action and thought. The First World War did not produce only dead bodies and exiles, the displacement of minorities, but also the (Soviet) revolution, that is, the capacity to revolt against the destiny of the defeated. In the same way, shock,

in Angela’s work, is the opportunity to revolt against what one has been assigned, what one is subjected to.

It is the trauma that creates the obligation to lm, to construct, and to invent an image that permits the weaving of a world of which one could previously only perceive bits. It is through the machine that it is possible to reconstruct, resow, reweave a world in fragments, a world in pieces and in shreds.

I arrive there with my camera and construct all sorts of things. A chain is established. I see things that I had never seen but which played an important role in my childhood.

Simultaneously, I perceive how an o cial history, that of the Turkish state, is constructed.

The technical machine has a micropolitical function that can “cure,” that can help piece together the fragments of a divided reality. The machine traces a process through which traumatized subjectivity can be constructed di erently.

The technical machine is not an apparatus of alienation but a component of subjectivation, and it is on the basis of the machine that there can be a micropolitics and even a politics. We cannot revolt against the society of the spectacle, against the continuous production of the media that subjugate us, without machines, for the machine works in-depth on the components of subjectivity that Angela mentions: a ect, memory, relationships.

The more media there are, the more these machines have to be used. Not to provide counterinformation, but to be able to get one’s bearings within them. To recognize and construct your memory, your gaze, your movements, your relationships, the reality that surrounds you.

Endnotes

(1) See Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire. Essai sur la relation du corps à l’espirit (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896); it has appeared in English as Matter and Memory: Essay on the Relation of Body and Spirit (1896), trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

(2) See Maurizio Lazzarato, Video loso a. La percezione del tempo nel post-fordisme (Rome: manifestolibri, 1996), it has appeared in English as Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism, trans. and ed. Jay Hetrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

(3) Translator’s note: a ection in French has the additional meaning of illness, ailment, a iction.

(4) Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 2012).

(5) Translator’s note: this is a play on words with the French avenir (future) and à venir (to come).

(6) Walter Benjamin, “Expérience et pauvreté,” Oeuvres II (Paris: Folio Essais, 2000).

Assemblages 2010

By Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato

Three-channel video and six-channel audio installation, 71 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 4:3

VO French, Brazilian Portuguese

Subtitles available in English, Korean, Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish

Assemblages is an audiovisual research project dedicated to the antiauthoritarian, revolutionary practice of psychiatry, philosophy, aesthetics, and anthropology of Félix Guattari (1930–1992). In an essayistic form, Melitopoulos and Lazzarato took up, triggered, and transposed Guattari’s thought, presenting it in new contexts while concentrating on his interest in animism, conceptions of subjectivity, and ecosophy. They shed light on and developed these issues in relation to Guattari’s practice at the La Borde experimental clinic, his travels, and the presence of his thought in Brazil and Japan.

Guattari’s work proposes the decolonization of thinking, which Melitopoulos and Lazzarato view as a model of work on new expanded subjectivities and their capacities for environment making. Guattari o ers a line of ight beyond the Western paradigm of the transcendental human subject, separate from the world of objects as well as other parts of nature and elds of science understood as a tool to conquer the nonhuman world. In his view, subjectivity functions in the form of assemblages—multidimensional montages of heterogenous phenomena that organize ows between singularities and collectivities, humans and objects, animals, machines, concepts and various cosmic forces.

Through their research into Guattari’s interest in animism, in this three-channel installation, they construct a collective reservoir of Indigenous life practices that are not divided into separate spiritual, material, human, and animal phenomena. In their work, the motif of animism resonates with Guattari’s complex, assemblage-like approach to patients at the La Borde clinic. They also seek out an actualization of animist subjectivities in contemporary micropolitical practices and projects that work toward the decolonization of life in the Brazilian context. Assemblages is composed of fragments of documentaries and interviews with Guattari’s friends and collaborators.

Of course it is a delirium by our standard;

I really loved when Guattari spoke about an “objectivized subject,” something like this…

So for me there is no singular and no collective unconscious

Animism is a mode of apprehending the world, a mode of conducting existence and thought.

The Life of Particles

The Life of Particles

By Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato

Three-channel video and six-channel audio installation, 82 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 4:3

VO French, Japanese

Subtitled available in English, Korean, and Spanish

The Life of Particles is the second part of the three-channel installation Assemblages about Félix Guattari and dedicated to Guattari’s interest in animist cultures in Japan. It enters into a dialogue with the contemporary situation of Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster in Fukushima, looking at the relationship between subjectivity, animist spirituality, and modern technology in Japan after 1945 that is formed by the history of radioactive contamination.

This video-essay installation poses questions about the production of new subjectivities and the environmental development by modern techno-science that is dependent on capitalist economies.

The lm’s historical context is framed by the nuclear attack on Japan toward the end of World War II and the rebuilding of the country on the foundations of science and energy-consuming technology. That history is juxtaposed with the crisis that struck the country after the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima and with contemporary protest movements against nuclear power. Fukushima compelled Japan to look back on its history and its links to animist traditions and hypermodernity. This catastrophe revealed all the hidden levels of the economy, politics, and culture.

In following Guattari’s travels to Japan, where he published his book on the three ecologies, Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato examine the entanglement of ecologies of the mind, society, and the environment alongside the issue of radioactivity. These are presented in the work as a set of interwoven relationships between psychology, geography, and economy.

The lm is a travelogue that begins with the sites of military colonization in Okinawa and the massive presence of the US military there since World War II. It returns to the “Atom for Peace” campaign in Hiroshima and the reconstruction of Japan as a country built on science within the ideology of so-called energy millenarianism as a nuclear dream project during the Cold War.

The Life of Particles provides a comprehensive look at the long-standing antinuclear struggles against the building of a new nuclear power plant on Iwai Island.

The research ends in Tokyo and Kyoto with the photographer and anthropologist Chihiro Minato and the butoh dancer Min Tanaka commenting on Japan’s history of technology in which the animist tradition is central for the development of Japanese craft and the relationship between nature and culture. “We cannot resolve the problem of radioactivity with this relationship between nature and culture. In Japan after Fukushima geography is psychology. The atmosphere does not move geometrically. We adapt not only to our environment but also to our psychosis.”

(Chihiro Minato)

Because Okinawa is a kind of Japanese and American colony

From this base, planes departed for the bombardment of Vietnam

But Japanese regime exploits the character of Okinawa people

But also to sell nuclear power, no in the form of weapon, but in a form called “peace”

The shifting of subjectivity is an important notion in animism.

Children, who lack of self-awareness, are satisfied and live with a wealth of sense.

The Language of Things

The Language of Things

2007

By Angela Melitopoulos

Single-channel video, stereo, 37 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 4:3

VO German, English

Subtitles available in English, German, Italian, and Spanish

Things, Walter Benjamin tells us, have a mute and inchoate form of speech, yet they communicate with each other by means of a material commonality. This commonality is immediate and magical. Only through the mediation of things can the world be grasped as a whole.

The Language of Things is subtitled with quotations from Benjamin’s “On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man” (1916). They appear over the image sequences of a precisely calibrated machinery of acceleration—carousels, wave pools, and the like—from Tokyo’s arti cial worlds and high-tech amusement parks.

Through the language of technology, the people in the amusement park rides can be outside themselves, ecstatic. For milliseconds, gravity is suspended and speed induces sheer joy. The video screen breaks apart. The technologies of this enjoyment are nonlinguistic e ects of a designating and calculated language: the language of humans, with its vocabulary of physical designations, leads to technical knowledge and the calculability of a ect. But to do so, human language also draws upon the language of things: in this sense, the language of things expresses, through technology, that very commonality by which the world seizes upon itself as an undivided whole.

WHEN

THE CAMERA EYE

DESCENDS

INTO THE DEEP EARTH AND SPEAKS IN THE LANGUAGE OF PARTICIPATION: MATRIXIAL WEAVING FOR POLITICAL AUTONOMY

Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi

LANDSCAPE/MAP/TERRITORY: TRIANGULATION

The Triangular Drama

Landscapes are observed, drawn, or painted. Maps are marked and territories are occupied or conquered. From this triangulation arises our relationship with the earth, this place that we inhabit, that surrounds and envelops us, cares for us, and determines the conditions in which we live.

The triangle of representation, notation, and construction gives rise to culture, whose reference eld is the body of the earth. The eye, which produces an image that the mind perceives, attests to what the hands create. This interaction between the senses—the seeing of the eyes, the perception of the mind, and the action of the hands—forms the reality that creates this subjective individuation, be it personal or collective. The painted landscape is a re ection of what the eye sees, and the mind perceives the map as truth.

Angela Melitopoulosʼs works penetrate the triangulation of the colonial gaze. The production of landscape paintings dates back to the colonial period,1 when they served as depictions of conquered territories, chronicles of a mental vision characterized by an ideal of victory that marks spaces and creates maps. Her work points to the illusion created and carried out on the earth by the correspondence between representation, recording, and the conquest of a geographical area. In her video assemblages the artist disrupts the order of representation whereby the earth, great hostess to the numerous species that inhabit her, is ensnared in the illusion of triangulation.

She reveals the dispositif that leads to the rei cation of the earth: from the expanses of cultivated land that the wounded earth tries to heal through technical and clinical means, to viticulture in Lower Austria (Matri Linear B. Part 1: Revisions, 2022), to extraction practices in a huge open-pit

gold mine by the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold in the unspoiled Skouries forest on the Kakavos Mountain, documented in the lm Unearthing Disaster II (2015), or the use of disused mines as a base and warehouse for military operations in Gangjeong Village, Jeju, Korea, depicted in The Refrain (2015). She also documents the construction of the Futenma airport runway in the Henoko coral reef zone in Okinawa in The Life of Particles (2012). The earth as productive surface—as arena, support, and background for military shooting activity—includes the expulsion of peoples from their living environments, shown in the lms Passing Drama (1999) and Crossings (2017) as exemplifying the objecti cation and appropriation of the earth. Her art is an unequivocal indictment of the desecration and the irremediable destruction of the earth. It echoes the voices of collective entities and opposition movements that steadfastly and insistently lament the trivialization of the earth. Men and women chanting for years to protest the presence of military camps on Jeju Island in Korea (The Refrain, 2016); Hiroshi Ashitomi, an activist opposed to the Futenma runway project who stood at the Henoko Beach Camp for 2,721 days; the daily dances and songs of the Kurds in the refugee camp at Lavrion near Athens (Crossings, 2017), and so on.

The Colonizing Eye: The Representational Eye

The objecti cation of the earth probably begins with the appraisal of the object itself, as the senses feel and perceive the surrounding space.

The satellite, that supreme eye that permits the sublime, divine gaze of our epoch, is the cultural technology of conquest par excellence. Its panoramic vision does not merely see what it records, it also marks it for purposes of conquest: it reduces the surface of the planet to a tabula rasa. It represents the earth as a completely trivialized, open box and breaks down its surface into particles to make it quanti able.

In the research project Matri Linear B, the recording made by this sublime gaze (of satellites) includes the Lower Austrian landscape (Part 1: Revisions) and the Australian continent, destroyed by colonial policy (Part 2: Surfacing Earth). Winemakers, maps in hand, show how the land is turning into a surface partitioned into coordinates for maximum yield, with disastrous consequences. The colonial eye perceives the earth as a representable object, a productive surface, a laboratory for extraction (Unearthing Disaster), a body for exploitation and a space for the distribution of power.

The map is not the territory.2 Alfred Korzybski’s formula means that what one sees, what is seen or observed, does not correspond to an objective reality. The object perceived by the satellite-eye is not a representation because what is seen is not an image corresponding to a concept that gives the thing signi cance. This apparently naive remark exposes the truth of an illusion: that the map is not a representation of the territory but rather its identi cation, classi cation, and (dis)position. Nor is the territory the landscape; it is the copy of an imagined space whose aestheticization marvelously draws and territorializes the earth.

I would like to emphasize here the epistemological signi cance of Melitopoulos’s art. Above and beyond the aesthetic practice through which the truth manifests itself in the language of freedom, her work seizes on the awareness of aesthetic medialization. She denounces the representational ability of particular media, which is maybe the beginning of that triangulation. Territorialization’s rst point of attack is the illusion that technical media present a true, objective representation of the object. Just as the map is not the territory, one could also assert that satellites do not represent the earth unless one conceives of the earth as an object whose truth is disclosed through seeing.

What such a truth denies is the fact that technical media never see everything. One can observe and see planet Earth, but not in its totality—there is no position outside of the planet for earthly observers to occupy—and so what one sees is not the real truth. Melitopoulos, on the contrary, shows the blind spots of observation, the unmarked space of the map and the alignment, the autonomy of that conquered space, the potential for deterritorialization, the zone of free individuation. A voice-over and black screens describe blind spots and the nondiscursive practice of the virtual universe. Thus the multichannel installation design, with a cross re of screens that turn on and o , along with the sound montage, gives voice to what one is not allowed to say and reveals our inability to recognize what we cannot see. Once the blind spot has been revealed, it ceases to be invisible; its invisibility becomes visible. In this sense, territorialization can be neither implemented nor completed. An eye, here, the satellite, not only sees but also maps and constructs an image of the earth, insofar as it sees.

The lm The Life of Particles reveals how the technical image (re)production (of the satellite eye) strives for operational goals in the interest of maintaining dominant national, economic, and military positions. The photographer, anthropologist, and antinuclear activist Chihiro Minato shows a map of the radiation range around Hiroshima. Concentric circles demarcate the degree of radiation in this area, but neither air movement nor the atmosphere can be de ned in geometric forms. The perfection of the delineated borders, however, shows the simple functioning of bureaucracy and the signi cance of designation: calculation in the service of certain goals and interests. “They outline a zone of compensation, of economy, the economy of war.”3

This practice of demarcation through control mechanisms extends to the cartography of the social body. In the lm The Cell. Antonio Negri and the Prison (2008), Melitopoulos reports on the court hearing of Antonio Negri. This was followed by his escape, arrest, and liberation, which led to the implementation of new forms of control in everyday life—particularly the control of prisoners but also of individual civilians. Melitopoulos’s camera testi es to the disciplinary gaze of the observing eye. The eye itself will be deprived of control if an eye, the eye of the sublime gaze, decenters, dehierarchizes, and breaks free.

Earth vs. Territory

As in the Faustian challenge of descending into the fathomless vaults of the earth to visit mysterious entelechies, so Melitopoulos’s camera plunges deep down to where the mothers of the

WHEN THE CAMERA EYE DESCENDS INTO THE DEEP EARTH…

earth reside. Her camera is the intermediary between collective memory and the earth’s body; it is the medium, the channel, through which the earth articulates its matrixiality.

The matrixiality of the earth speaks of powers that penetrate and transcend all expressions of individuality and constructions of identity. It concentrates all the di erent powers into a single structure comprising the power of the earth, a power of creation and destruction: chaosmosis.

The matrixiality of the earth rejects the triangulation of the colonial gaze. From this perspective, one cannot regard the earth as an object if one inhabits it and if it shelters and cares for one. Matrixiality is not about techniques of observing and visualizing the earth from without, but of observing and visualizing its inner fabric. The earth is the place of accommodation—the house, the niche—which encloses all social, animal, vegetal, and nonorganic structures. This matrixial link to the earth is the reality of a collective structure constituted by the liation of intimacy—the inner relationships—the genus of all related individuals and entities. This link arises when one being, of any species, is the living space for a second entity and this second entity is caring for another. Such cohesive living spaces can be seen, for example, in the lm Matri Linear B. Part 2: Surfacing Earth in the Tapatjatjaka Art and Craft Centre in Australia. Here women weave pieces (sub-objects) that recount the story of their alliance within a worldwide network of mothers, and so with Mother Earth, with the progenitrix.4

In this sense the camera eye does not make discoveries, it neither conceals nor reveals. These sub-objects are the traces that the deep history of the earth has left us, that have not been e aced by the irreversibility of time. Melitopoulos’s artistic activity deterritorializes the forces of conquest. This theme runs like a red thread through her work, a practice of emancipation. Minorities wander through crossings, paths, and trails in the shadow of empire, alignments are traced on its map, and the old order is deterritorialized. The repetitive singing of sounds also deterritorializes. Melitopoulos collected fteen refrains from the geo-military corridor that connects Japan and Korea: Jeju Island and the cities of Paju, Uijeongbu, and Seoul in Korea, and the islands of Okinawa and Iwai in Japan. These refrains are potent in a place that is strongly marked by an animist tradition. They are the forms and the quality of expression that voice the relationship to the territory, to internal impulses, and to external circumstances. Ritual singing is the expression of a digni ed participation in the body of the earth. It is a celebration of partial subjectivity, insofar as individuals are connected to relation. The Refrain (2015) obliterates the curve of the “military umbrella” on the map of US military operations between the islands of Okinawa and Jeju in 1945 and creates a co-immune, protective, and sheltering space.

These are agent-free spaces, autonomous temporary spaces, like the Kurdish refugee camp in Lavrion, whose organization is based on a combination of an egalitarian structure, song, and dance (Crossings, 2017). The molecular distribution of collective autonomy is the central theme of the lm The Life of Particles. Water particles inform the symbolic code of the deterritorialization movements depicted in the lm. This is the representation of molecular singularities, entities whose expressive power gives rise to a movement that transcends and escapes from the determinate boundaries of operational action. These are the paths of hope where life continues and, improbable as it might seem, moves forward. This is life.

ZONE ZERO OF THE SIGNIFIER: THE LANGUAGE GAMES OF INNER RELATIONSHIPS

Expressions of the Earth: How Does the Earth Speak?

The earth neither speaks in the language of axiomatic linguistics nor in its signi cations. It leaves us traces to drift through, to read and decipher, the traces left by time and preserved in the body of the earth. For example, there are the discoveries excavated from deep with the earth.5 These are not objects, because their form eludes the representation of an idea. On the contrary, the value of these discoveries resides in their fundamental participation in the earth’s history. Figurines marked as female found in Austria are three-dimensional expressions participating in the body of the earth, not complete enunciations. The circumscribed meaning of such discoveries is created by their relation to other enunciations. They are structures of enunciation, in that the form marked as female is connected to the unmarked space of the earth.6

The earth can be read through its component objects, not through the colonizing eyes of imaginary representations. We cannot transform particles into objects through the traces of the earth, but we can read the earth. This de es the “bourgeois statement” of language as conceived by Walter Benjamin, whereby the means of communication is the word, the subject is the thing, and the receiver is a person. The epistemic dimension of this statement is the colonial gaze, which separates things from their meaning and their material representation; its aesthetic dimension is the landscape, the territorialization of the map, perceived by trivial eyes as harmonious and aesthetically perfect. Melitopoulos approaches these philosophical interpretations with precise criteria, and it is no coincidence that she also uses Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man” (1916). His apparently simple statement that language is an expression conveyed by a spiritual being contrasts markedly with naturalistic theories of language, according to which language is exclusively a human mode of expression.7 Accordingly, the language of things conveys neither the things, nor their functionality or their rei cation. The language of things conveys things in their communicative and expressive power.

The language of this lamp, for example, communicates not the lamp (for the mental being of the lamp, insofar as it is communicable, is by no means the lamp itself) but the languagelamp, the lamp in communication, the lamp in expression.8

Melitopoulos performs a pirouette here in that she confers upon the language of things a spiritual dimension, due to their expressibility (The Language of Things, 2007). In this way she indicates that the language of things, insofar as it imputes communication to a spiritual essence, seems to be the expression of a spirit. If substance, form, and content come together, if form equals meaning, the expression of things is communicated. Eric Alliez says that we can then speak of an animalistic position of language.9 The open structure of language also denotes transindividual, realistic, and cosmic thinking whereby the spiritual dimension is imputed to things. The relationship between animism and a zone zero of language, the asigni cant level of language, pervades all of Melitopoulos’s work. She employs asigni cant language structure in the lm The Language

of Things (2007). Signs are not limited to their meanings, they are uctuations, so that the world of expressions is a world of relationships and connections, a bundle of enunciations. The things expressed are things in their enunciational structure, which when lined up together form a network of phonetic signi ers.

Thus Melitopoulos documents that the rst entry into the world is not an entrance, nor is it the normative territory, nor does it presuppose the conquest of a territory. It is more an arrival in the body of the earth, whose response to such a gift is to deterritorialize the conquest, to show the creative and inventive dimension of these processes of subjecti cation and to transmute them into practice.

CINE-SOMATIC EXCURSUS I: THE ART OF WEAVING

Melitopoulos, weaver of images and narrator of stories, employs her technical means to retrieve lost memory. The camera medium represents and shows something that speaks for a loss. The art of editing weaves together the traces whose signs denote a loss that reproduces their voice. Thus a latent memory is invoked, and forgotten stories are woven. To this end, she merges digital and analog technology in her cinematic practice. From Passing Drama (1999) to the Matri Linear B project, the analog and the digital are united within a weaving technique that narrates a nonlinear story.

When Melitopoulos mixes analog and digital signals, she reverses the technical determinacy of each type of signal. The analog medium plays a continuous time whereas the digital is responsible for the fragmentation of continuous time, and both degenerate into technical codes when she converts them into a succession of signals. Her editing technique breaks though the continuous time tension of the analog signals and reweaves the loose particles (a sequence of signals), creating a continuity of interruptions. The seriality of discrete signs produces a sense of continuity, and the analog quality manifests a continuum of interruptions. It creates nonlinear ow of connections and thereby a new space of consistency.

The reprogramming of analog and digital technology is a hacker practice in that it “reverses the normal cinematic procedure.”10 Melitopoulos seeks to demonstrate the power of art by liberating the symbolism of the code or sign system by which a technique is expressed from its technical determinacy. There is a transcendental purpose to this: that of bestowing time—and with it virtuality and potential/virtual movement—upon these singular, nonanalog, immobile slices of time.11 The series is transformed into singular time images.

Disruption: From Seriality to Singularity

According to technical determinacy, digital characters are the discrete signs of a serial calculation, in that the value of each character is determined by the previous and subsequent values. The value of digital characters is in fact de ned by a higher order, which determines the probability of occurrence of subsequent characters. Their degree of freedom depends purely on the interplay of combinations and the regularity of the character sequences.

Melitopoulos’s weaving destroys every higher order. It breaks with the seriality of a stochastic chain, that is, the de ned ordering of characters. It interrupts the order and strives for the liberation of each character so that it can achieve its maximum degree of freedom: its singularity. Thus the individual elements of a series become singular individual parts. If one extracts the particles from the series or sequence they remain asigni cant; they lose meaning, but they gain singularity. Matter broken down into the smallest possible particles is not ordered according to a serial sequence of discrete signs governed by the probability of occurrence, but each singular thing gains its expression and its potential for enunciation. This is exactly what is depicted in The Language of Things and pushed to its extreme in The Life of Particles

Editing: The Technique of Weaving

The weaving of every individual element of a series, all the singular details, constitutes the technical, aesthetic, epistemological, and political practice of Melitopoulos. She uses editing—the original articulation of which, already highly developed, is expressed in Passing Drama—as a technique for generating a memory; the editing changes the duration, and the memory repeats, activates, and reconstitutes in the present what in time has fallen into oblivion. Inspired by the two types of memory evoked by Henri Bergson, Melitopoulos uses video editing as a technique to provoke virtual states of memory and surface consistency in the form of dreams, spiritual practice, etc., provided that the editing “protracts or expands the permitted duration.”12 Editing is a nonlinear compositional work: What is the order of such a hypertextual organization of narrational techniques? An order that our attention must navigate “from junction to junction, from link to link, from one process of combination to another.”13

Melitopoulos creates a new order and a new narrative as she transcribes individual pieces into the continuous recording medium of video. Her rst video artwork already indicates the immense importance of time and image in her editing. Time is the basis of the possibility of concatenation (The Language of Things), where individual elements are repeatedly reconnected. In time, new syntagmatic concatenations are created, each part creating its enunciational structure through its interactions with other new orders. The editing technique frees the individual from any kind of mechanical time, giving rise to new concatenations.

The enunciative power of semiotic, social, and epistemic elements emphasizes the expressive sense of the real and has a deterritorializing e ect on the designated boundaries of the normative laws that are the basis of language and its rules. An assemblage of enunciations or enunciation structure: enunciations are in relation/participation with others, which in turn participate in something else. They are coupled with one another because, were they to split (schizo-), they would become meaningless. There are no isolated pieces of enunciation unless they are excluded from the institutional order of social structures, for example in prisons or psychiatric institutions. Félix Guattari’s cry “we need to open up” calls for the opening up of disciplinary organizational structures and functional dispositions of forged identities.14 The psychiatrist and anarchist Francesc Tosquelles, in exile in Saint-Alban during the Second World War, founded a facility for cooperative participation. This became a model for the experimental psychiatric clinic at La Borde,

founded by Jean Oury in 1953 and in which Guattari worked from the mid-1950s until his death. The lm Déconnage (2012) is about the history of the founding of this psychotherapeutic clinic.

CINE-SOMATIC EXCURSUS II: THE CRY OF MOTHER EARTH

History is not written but woven. Melitopoulos weaves images and thus constructs history. Weaving has never been a linear technique. Likewise, mechanical weaving breaks into the linearity of analog technique to form a history that knows no mechanical and deterministic time, but is invested in the uncertainty of an irreversible time.

In this respect, editing transcends mere technique. It becomes a practice for the liberation of collective memory from the linear narrativity of history, whereby the present is the place from which the past is perceived, and the future, a time derived from the past. In this way, Melitopoulos succeeds in detaching each sequence from the linearity of a continuous chain and, rather than basing the present on the repetition of the past, opening it up to retrieve latent memories. She succeeds in activating the eternal present by creating a bridge between material and spiritual reality, and she pursues with her camera the traces left behind by the lost but not forgotten past.

The camera does not ght against the unidirectional arrow of time but takes from it its radicalness, that is to say, its evolution. The maxim expressed by the pre-Socratic Heraclitus, “One cannot step twice into the same river,” states that the return to real time is impossible. Time knows only one direction: it advances. Events occur, and what happens will never happen again in exactly the same way. From this it can be inferred that every event, every experience, is intrinsically indeterminable and unpredictable—that is, singular. In turn, this sentence poses a problem for consciousness because it declares that memory does not record everything. It forgets. Henri Bergson even claimed that memory is used to forget, to the mind’s advantage, making it possible to recreate each present. This is real time, analog time, the time of loss. But loss is not disappearance. Everything that happens leaves material traces on the earth, and these are stored in latent memory and can be recalled. This is process time, achieved through Melitopoulos’s art of technical weaving. Memory is retrieved not in the form of recollection but rather as an update of a virtual state, a state stored in latency.

The aesthetic impact of Melitopoulos’s camera functions in the present. The present, then, is the automatic time that, updated by the virtual states of a state that has fallen into oblivion, opens up to new meanings and inscribes the present.

Traces of the Earth: Detonation of an Anamnesis

The earth’s traces testify not to a discovery but to the time of irreversibility; they are traces left by the arrow of time. Traces are not bound to an object; they are based on the creative virtuality15 of the partial objects of the earth, which is open to the possible, to history that is dormant in latency and can be updated and reopened by material signs. Each trace, then, is matrixial16 in that it indicates an intimate participation. The memory of alliance is activated through its material signs.

These do not speak of a past, but in the present one can decipher in them the traces of a loss. The mysterious Venus gurines found in Lower Austria are an example.17 Walpurga Antl-Weiser says that nothing is known about the true signi cance of the Venus of Willendorf at the time to which the discoveries are dated.18 But we know that such component objects—component because they are themselves structures of enunciation that participate in the earth—activate the latent memory of a matrixial force through signs marked as female. This allows the present to be rewritten, through the call of the earth, by following traces one has to navigate and pass through. Taking up or following the trail calls upon virtual memory and generates history. This is achieved after an act of cooperative seeing: my eye is not that of the subject; my eye captures the trace—still that trace must be witnessed by an other. My legs follow the traces that my eyes see; my eyes see the traces that capture a gaze. The traces are simple clues to something else.

The anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski writes of the cognition of Indigenous people. How are traces recognized? Via a system in which all the particles share information about each other among themselves. The traces are followed: “Our hands followed the trace, of what our see saw” and so on.19

CHAOSMOTIC UMBILICAL ZONE20

The Indigenous Ngarrindjeri women from Southeast Australia sit together while weaving. They weave various items like mats or baskets.21 These are not objects because there is no functionality that exploits the totality of their signi cation, and above all because their creation participates in matrixial history. Weaving is a practice of cooperative cohesion within a line of uterine descent, that originates in women and is passed down among them. The heart of the woven piece is where the practice begins, and the weaving is built up around it. It is the umbilicus,22 connecting all the Weltgestalterinnen23 (world-designing women) who shape the world from which they originated and from which they continue to weave communities.

A Consistent Level of Creation

The earth does not represent a Welthorizont (world horizon); we all participate in it. People are also above all part of a collective. Guattari spoke of assemblage rather than of subjectivity, for “human beings are considered as human beings as well as part of a collective, as concepts, as animals, as objects or machines.”24 From a matrixial viewpoint, and with the help of Melitopoulos’s camera eye, one could say that the collective is internal to human beings, just as the earth is what de nes man as an earthly being. The ontological designation of the earth resides in the fact that it is not a surface on which assemblages lie but the system of our ecology, our ontological determination of existence as an assemblage. Each component structure participates in the inner relationship of the great matrix. As long as one is part of the body of the earth, one is both resident and accommodations. The earth is ontological because every individuation, every single element, exists in relation to the others; and not only in that relation but also in an endo-relation, a relation of interiority.25 If the plant or the vegetative is part of the animalistic, as the particle is part of the plant, the photosynthesis of the plant is a function in which the animal participates.

Kinship is woven into the inherent participation in the particular being, a liation of immanence whose structures are those of inward relationship. Animism describes a world horizon where there is no ontological di erence between di erent beings. Man is an object among objects according to the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro,26 in the same way that the soul is not opposed to matter and content and expression are equal, so that each expression is a structure of enunciation, an intensity that pervades the body. The animistic conception of subjectivity is the leitmotif in Melitopoulos’s work. She pursues forms in which it is expressed, such as psychosomatic traces in collective knowledge (Assemblages), ethnological documentation in animistic territories (The Life of Particles), and singing as an act of animism (The Refrain), as well as its sculptural traces (Matri Linear B). I would emphasize the intimate participation of the animistic conception. This subjectivity has become lost in our linguistic relations, in the sense that speaking exteriorizes the spirit. Animism shows us the endo-relationship of the liation network in which all participants are ontologically equal, insofar as their essence participates in a matrix and they become an assemblage in relation to cooperative connections. Filiation is endogenous, whereas alliance networks are cooperative.

The umbilical zone is the zone where all endo-relationships come together, the heart of life. Phylogenetic endo-relationships are systems of contingent alliances, feeling through the eyes of others, seeing through the skin, smelling through the mouth. Chaotic and complex. Chaotic in that all forms dissolve in the magma of all possibilities, and complex because only through this process can new patterns be formed. All signs respond to a formative matrixial force operating upon the earth. Creation, however, stands in equivalent tension to chaotic immanence, not without the destruction and dissolution of that form. Complexity and chaos are reconciled, and every framework of complexity in the world sets the ontological bases of chaos at the same time.

The large (virtual) surface of consistency, where every evolution and all processes come together, is chaosmotic, in that life and death, the giving of form and the release of form, coincide. It is in this that the procedural ontology of the body of the earth resides. The chaosmotic umbilical zone is the nucleus of autopoiesis, the source of self-determination and self-creation. This is why the autonomy of a nities is salvaged, because it is blind to the outside. That is Melitopoulos’s aesthetic and political intention. To call for internal, temporary autonomy, to assimilate the temporary zone and not to place it in a dialectical relationship to the state apparatus but to show its constitutive power.

Antonio Negri says that we must not dream.27 Working on reality should liberate us from reality. Refugees grow up with the intuition that the real story resembles a fairy tale.28 Maybe because the innocent seeing of the “thinking feet”29 is more akin to virtual memory than to the vision of those whose eyes have been shaped by disciplinary organizational structures. Fairy tales are stories that tell of impossibilities. The paths of deterritorialization are not only paths of hope and autonomous zones of movement, they also reveal the certitude that life is woven of improbabilities: a consistent level of creation, just as life itself is the greatest improbability of all.

Endnotes

(1) Howard Morphy, “Colonialism, History and the Construction of Place: The Politics of Landscape in Northern Australia,” in Landscape Politics and Perspective, ed. Barbara Bender (New York: Routledge, 1993) 205–244. See also James Elkins and Rachel DeLue, Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008), 175 et seq.

(2) Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (New York: The International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company, 1933), 747–761.

(3) The Life of Particles, 2012, 00:35:06.

(4) Matri Linear B. Part 2: Surfacing Earth, 2021, 00:03:30.

(5) Matri Linear B. Part 1: Revisions, 2022, 01:12:14–01:47:48.

(6) Félix Guattari, Chaosmose, ed. and trans. Thomas Wäckerle (1992; Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2017), 44 .

(7) Walter Benjamin, Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen, ed. Fred Lönker (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2019), 21; it has appeared in English as “On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996), 63.

(8) Benjamin, Über Sprache, 11.

(9) Assemblages, 2010, 00:20:10.

(10) Angela Melitopoulos and Michaela Ott, Freeze Frames. Zum Verhältnis von Fotogra e und Film (Bielefeld: Transscript Verlag, 2010), 200.

(11) Melitopoulos and Ott, Die Sprache der Dinge, 201.

(12) Angela Melitopoulos, Timescapes B-Zone (Berlin: Filter, 2000), 39.

(13) Melitopoulos, Timescapes B-Zone, 45.

(14) Assemblages, 00:30:14.

(15) Guattari, Chaosmose, 37.

(16) Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi, Matrixiale Philosophie. Mutter-Welt-Gebärmutter: Zu einer dreiwertigen Ontologie (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019).

(17) Walpurga Antl-Weiser in Matri Linear B. Part 1: Revisions, 2022, 01:27:35.

(18) Matri Linear B. Part 1: Revisions, 01:21:05.

(19) Assemblages, 00:09:25.

(20) Guattari, Chaosmose, 173.

(21) Matri Linear B. Part 2: Surfacing Earth, 00:01:02.

(22) Matri Linear B. Part 2, 00:02:49.

(23) A neologism coined by the author in Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi, “Propositio I. Die Mutter ist Weltbildend,” in Matrixiale Philosophie, 109–147.

(24) Barbara Glowczewski in Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato, “Machinic Animism,” in Animism, ed. Anselm Franke (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 2010), 11 (exhibition catalogue).

(25) Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi, “Demonstratio II: Für eine Ontologie der Innenweltlichkeit. Der Körper der Mütter als Endomilieu,” in Matrixiale Philosophie, 84–106.

(26) Assemblages, 00:14:43–00:17:15.

(27) In prison you are not free to let your imagination wonder, or as Negri puts it: “You’re not allowed to have dreams, or, you can’t falsify reality. You have to work in this reality in order to free yourself from it, in order to change it, but you must always accept it. You’re in prison and not anywhere else. There are spaces in which you can work, also inner spaces, but you can’t imagine being anywhere else, otherwise you injure yourself too much because you are immediately thrown back into reality. That’s why you’re not allowed to dream, because each time you dream you’re without protection.” Antonio Negri: The Cell, quoted in Axel Koenzen, “Deadweight,” interview by Hanna Keller, Berlinale Forum (2016), 41. It has appeared in Spanish in Tom Waibel, “Quién es libre realmente? Antonio Negri y la cárcel,” in Multitud singular. El arte de resistir (Madrid: Museo Reina Sofía, 2009), 73.

(28) Passing Drama, 00:02:20.

(29) Angela Melitopoulos in “Tosquelles: pensar con los pies,” a discussion with Carles Guerra, Perejaume, Angela Melitopoulos, and Sandra Alvarez de Toledo at the CCCB on April 8, 2022, (00:42:50–00:44:38), https://www.cccb. org/es/actividades/ cha/tosquelles-pensar-con-los-pies/238727.

Matri Linear B

An audiovisual research project by Angela Melitopoulos

In Matri Linear B, four very di erent geographies become the laboratory of an open- eld research study about how we perceive our environment. The project is about re-visions, about shifts and new scales of information and process technologies that experimentally explore ways of seeing the landscape and environment, in order to rethink the making of history though geology, sediment, strati cation, and the terrestrial surface. Expressed through the landscape, the deep time of geology is surfacing earth.

But satellite images contain narrative qualities of technologies that can scale perspectivity. They thus contain a scienti c-geological history that overwrites a matri-linear (body-to-body) relation as a social technology and knowledge related to the earth. Both methods are machinic processes, which means they are technical and also social, they maintain outward-facing automated relations and organize social relations internally through autopoietic processes.

The Matri Linear B research project takes as its starting point the expressive powers of the earth’s surface as “speaking landscapes,” as agencies of a statement, and explores how we can relearn how we see them; it explores the relationship between the landscape, those who view it, and the cinematic and kinetic means of visualizing it (cinematography, satellite images, cartography, painting) as well as scienti c methods of image production (archaeology, anthropology).

The double-screen installation combines the panorama of landscapes with their mythological histories. Storytelling operates as a form of knowledge transmission—as, for example, in Indigenous cosmologies in which human and nonhuman actors function as a group. These ancient cultural technologies conceive geologically formed landscapes as deep time.

The hominid in our shared imaginary is characterized by earthiness, making the human observer themselves part of the observation of the environment. For anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, anthropology is a science of the relations of observation, since in the anthropologist’s discourse, the discourse of the “native” co-relates in mutual relationships so that it is the subject and the subject matter of their observation. The shifting subject-object orders that, with anthropology, contributed to the critique of modernity, today a ect both the dominions of this knowledge and all life on earth. This means that the human and the micro- and macro-relationships of the earth have a common physical function of sensory perception but perspectives that are culturally distinct, which intersect and interact. The perspectives in perception and cultures are essentially multiperspectival.

Matri Linear B. Part 1: Revisions

2022

By Angela Melitopoulos

Two-channel video and eight-channel audio installation, 103 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 16:9

VO German, English

Subtitles availabled in English, German, and Spanish

Revisions, the rst part of the project, takes as its point of departure the landscapes of Lower Austria—a region of intensive industrial agriculture as well as biotopes and archaeological sites.

The knowledge of the farmers there is guided by the modern expertise of government/science, which observes cultivation using satellite images and assists in the production processes. Organized for industrial purposes, the landscape of the Weinviertel region is also riddled with tunnels dating back to the seventeenth century. Beneath the surface of the earth lie numerous wine cellars with a geological-psychological potential that shapes social relationships. Today, the landscape of Lower Austria is dominated by industrial agriculture, which is a ected both by climate change and an acute rural exodus.

The farming community has shrunk rapidly over the last forty years, while the mechanization of agriculture has steadily increased. From a cosmological point of view, more and more land is being looked at by fewer and fewer observers. At the same time, digital imaging processes are increasingly being used to regulate and control decisions in farming across Europe, primarily with satellite images but also using robotics.

New, alternative ways of life for agriculture in Lower Austria involve organic farming methods, which sidestep conventional market dictates and regulations by using alternative distribution methods. They impact the entire social life of a society, its inheritance, more equal gender relations, and an ecological knowledge of the earth. The crises caused by industrial agriculture in the 1990s shook the last generation of winegrowers. The devaluation of the agricultural workforce made a reevaluation of ecological methods and their social impacts necessary. But the use of biochemical substances still in uences all living beings on a molecular level.

The Paleolithic and Neolithic sites of Lower Austria o er the opportunity to investigate the soil strati cation through its vertical geological order (stratigraphy) as history. Archaeological ndings that were dug up in a small area in Stratzing—dating from di erent time periods often thousands of years apart—reveal the di culties that archaeology has in interpreting our history.

In the 1960s feminist researchers—particularly Marija Gimbutas—began to fundamentally transform our understanding of the role of women in prehistory. They started to make connections between archaeology and anthropology, highlighting the idea of matriarchal social structures and the role of the Venus gures in prehistoric societies. The revision of the interpretations of prehistoric nds in modern archaeology, especially the interpretation of gender-speci c roles in prehistory, has challenged the history of science but limits our ideas in imaginative terms.

Two research interviews, with the science historian Claudine Cohen and the matriarchal researcher Heide Göttner Abendroth, underline these transformations and also aim to reenvision the archaeological eld from an inclusive feminist perspective.

These images from the research interviews with Heide Göttner Abendroth and Claudine Cohen were shown as part of the installation Matri Linear B. Part 1: Revisions , 2022.

Part

Matri Linear B. Part 2: Surfacing Earth 2021

By Angela Melitopoulos

Two-channel video and eight-channel audio installation, 71 mins.

Color, aspect ratio 16:9

VO English

Subtitles available in English, German, Turkish, Greek, and Spanish

Central to the project’s second part, Surfacing Earth, are the cosmologies and land rights politics of Indigenous Australians in Yuendumu and Titjikala in the Northern Territory. They appear as a horizon and boundary in a transmitted cosmology that is over forty thousand years old. They require a way of thinking about the relativity of space, which, according to astrophysicist Arturo Escobar, “is not to be thought about with universal concepts, but with several universes at the same time that can be interconnected . . .”

Aboriginal storytelling re ects the polyvalent nature of the visual eld of landscape. The transmission of memory through song, dance, and painting re ects a knowledge passed on according to one’s own sense of responsibility, belonging, and experience. The history of Aboriginal people is interwoven with the history of plants, minerals, and stars and forms a joint historical continuity. Yet, it is disrupted by the colonial genocide and land theft of the British Empire and its settlement politics that still form the basis of today’s repressive politics against Aboriginal people.

In Surfacing Earth the paintings of Nita Ferguson from the art center in Titjikala show the fault lines of the colonial negotiation of land and culture from the perspective of a generation of children whose parents had to work as “stockmen” on the farms of the white settlers without pay. Nita Ferguson does not paint to gain land rights. Her art and narrative speak of an outlook that sees the land as imagination and strati cation. Her work interprets the ruptures between the spaces of the landscape as the imagined but real space of its history. It confronts the powerlessness of colonial disenfranchisement but also the current commercialization in the art and tourism market tied to Aboriginal art.

THE VIDEO PHILOSOPHER

Never believe that a smooth space will su ce to save us.1

Steps, a car ride, the view from the train, from the plane, of the passing landscapes. She is a traveler who does not arrive, or who always arrives at the wrong time, at the wrong place. It is the wrong places that reveal themselves for her to tell. Untermarkersdorf, Maria-Lanzendorf, Megali Panagia, Titjikala, Jeju . . . As she drives around and to the places, they become right places, protagonists in the drama called Anthropocene. She is also always too late, the inevitability of history had already happened long ago and lies there in front of her, like a Benjaminian pile of rubble.

And then she pauses on the journey from one wrong place to another even more wrong place, and watches and listens. And only through this watching and listening do they reveal themselves, the threads that Arachne, the history spider, had spun her webs with across the landscapes from here to there.

Most of the time it is hot. She follows the spinning threads, stopping at the nodal points to ask. She asks the dusty landscape where it will belong when there is nothing left for it to produce. She asks who remembers what has happened. Who remembers? The stones? The trees, were they already there? The chorus of birds, has it been repeating ever since? But once spoken, there is no going back. The stones weigh their weight in the severity of history. The trees whisper secrets. Not a speck of dust that does not know. And oblivion has vanished forever.

In 1996, the groundbreaking work Video loso a (Videophilosophy)2 by Maurizio Lazzarato was published. It draws heavily on her video-art work that stretches times, refusing to agree to a linear time frame. The book is indeed a collaboration, Lazzarato is thinking through her imagery, her video images are shaped by the philosophies of labor and linearity in the post-Fordist era. Thus, we experience “crystallisations of time,” as Lazzarato writes; complex perceptual assemblages that are able to disrupt the perception of time within the necropolitics of contemporary capitalism.

Erna recounts3 how she has worked all her life. Sitting next to her, Melitopoulos listens. Erna’s hands tell, the skin tanned by the sun tells, the words with which she tells the course of her life are clear. “That’s how it was back then, that’s what we ate, so much work, by hand.” And the brother inherited everything. The injustices of patriarchy, reconstituted in the property relations of the rural areas, become markers in time, since then and still. “Too little, too little, one was always in need of more.” Yet Erna is not a victim but a storyteller who, in the injustice of history, has enriched her circuitous strategies and her knowledge of the land, the weather, the soil, the plants. After all, everything used to be more work, hands-on work. Together they become seekers, for the residues, the traces, for the water, for the knowledge of the landscape. The earth is being read.

The social workers4 at the “facility for the disabled” in Maria-Lanzendorf, which borders Vienna to the southeast, look disturbed as an elderly man and a young woman with a camera face them. “You can believe me, I was here,” the man walks through the rooms, into the dining room. “Disabled children,” he whispers. They only know from hearsay, from the older people, they only work there, they are not from there at all. “And according to stories, the dead are said to lie over there, in the meadow.”

A scene from which the documentary breaks out, incomprehensible, unreconciled. The man, her father, returns to the place of his concentration camp internment. With his return, he gives the dead a memory, he remembers, and they can, indeed must, believe him. Even if this story remains unbelievable. People can talk about it now that it is no one’s fault. They can talk about it because “they weren’t there.” But Petros Melitopoulos must tell, even if no one believes him. Just as she has to lm, and let the words and images weave the story. “I think I was made of cement back then.”

Trees have grown where the dead are buried. There is no memorial. And there won’t be. But the fact that memory nevertheless continues to write itself, that Arachne continues to spin and history continues to weave itself, is owed to the words that have coagulated into video pixels, which are repeated and retrieved until they have imprinted their trace on the memory.

In the car,5 Nebojša Vilić, the young man in the back seat, spins a narrative into the future, from the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity to Nowhere. He begins to talk about Europe and its failure, about the creation of connections between countries and goods, but also between people. With the reconstruction of the European route after the Yugoslav Wars, there are no more connections, no more will to exchange, the borders have closed. Disastrous scenes take place, we see road workers installing the roads to nowhere. He has many questions: “Did they destroy the road during the war in order to rebuild it?”

The war acts as an economic machine because the reparations produce the economic structures of global nancial capitalism. All the knowledge, the information, the stories are on the road, they also travel along. The video image travels along, it is like the road, always in motion, just as her thinking is always in motion, replacing concepts with images that operate in time, producing and constantly updating themselves via the electrical impulses of the video pixels. Thoughts circulate twenty- ve times a second. His questions are more relevant today than ever, the geopolitical con icts produce the mental concepts of our reality. “European Union rebuilt the road, for transit

purposes of goods, not of people. We were forced to destroy everything, to rebuild the same thing that we destroyed.”

Back in the car,6 the journey continues, it had never stopped, the protest movement and the driving movement, the image movement and the vocal melodies belong inseparably linked. The two of them, Elli Damaskou and Jannis Deligiovas, sit in the back of the car on the way to the gold mine. They have been there many times; they have never seen it like this. He recounts the beginning of the extraction, the destruction of the forests, the contamination of the water, of an entire stretch of land, Halkidiki in Northern Greece. The shock on their faces, at the radical nature of the destruction, it has only been three days since their last visit. Again, she has arrived too late, but the rapid transformation of capitalist destruction is visible in their bewilderment. We understand it through the view from the car that follows their gaze. They can no longer recognize it.

In Melitopoulos's cinematic works, time is shifted and subverted. We can hear how it does not stop, how a “videophilosophy” of the present intervenes in the conditions we experience, but also in their conditionality and in their mere coming into being. It is an intervention in the politics of memory that surround us, that crystallize in the spaces that are never smooth.

* This text was rst published in the catalogue Trembling Time, Osnabrück, European Media Art Festival (EMAF) no. 36 (2023): 61–63, and revised for this catalogue published by Museo Reina Sofía.

Endnotes

(1) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Tausend Plateaus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 1992), 698.

(2) See Maurizio Lazzarato, Video loso a. La percezione del tempo nel postfordisme (Rome: manifestolibri, 1996); it has appeared in English as Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism, trans. and ed. Jay Hetrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).

(3) Matri Linear B. Revisions, 2022.

(4) Passing Drama, 1999.

(5) Corridor X, 2006.

(6) Unearthing Disaster II, 2015.

ZONKEY – Learning to Speak with Earth

2020–2023

By ZONKEY (Angela Melitopoulos and Kerstin Schroedinger)

Nonsynchronized audio playback via headphones, installation Ten music pieces.

Earthtracks:

1. Xrisimopoio, 5' 38''

2. Cou Cou, 9' 52''

3. Beaches of Lower Austria, 8' 30''

4. Oma, 11' 04''

5. Whisper Bleep, 9' 09''

6. Elektrodad, 2' 44''

7. Portokali, 5' 28''

8. Ping Pong, 2' 50''

9. Somamedic, 4' 46''

10. Mellow Mou, 4' 26''

ZONKEY – Learning to Speak with Earth is an electroacoustic music and storytelling project, which began in March 2020 as part of The Dissident Goddesses research project. This acoustic longterm study on listening and following interspecies communication uses musical improvisation in the eld and recordings made with sensitive microphones. This research is carried out as an electroacoustic experiment. Voices, speech, and vocal melodies are understood in connection with the earth, its layers, living beings, and movements on the surface, as another form of history. ZONKEY’s aim is to experience the process of listening and sonar expression as a process of narrative transformation.

The storytelling sessions that follow describe three live events that took place in September 2021. For each of the storytelling events an expert was invited to the narrative space of the yurt—the space of The Dissident Goddesses project in Alberndorf in Lower Austria. In the immediate vicinity of the yurt—the neighboring landscape of vineyards and the hilltop of the Toten Mann itself—the transmission of sound is important since it creates the possibility of making the connection between the storyteller in the performative act of speech comprehensible as an agent of the living environment.

Session 1:

Heretic Gazing, 2021

A walk through the land at the Toter Mann, collecting herbs and a conversation with the Viennabased herbalist Renate Ganser about resilient knowledge, herbs, and the self-healing powers of the land.

Session 2:

Phytography or Plants as Screens, 2021

A conversation with the Cairo-based artist Omnia Sabry about her experimental photography project in which she uses plant leaves and owers as photographic mediums. Ephemeral, fragile images emerge that explore the connection between nature and its representation. A selection of reproductions of the photographs that slowly develop an image over the course of the day’s event series was on display in the yurt.

Session 3:

Becoming Land, 2021 single-channel video, 39 mins.

Storytelling session with French anthropologist Barbara Glowczewski about the land struggles of Aboriginal Australians, their artistic and legal strategies, and how their cosmology has changed scienti c subject-object orders. Glowczewski, who has been working with the Warlpiri people in Central Australia since the 1980s, states that “the myth is performed wording (chant, dance, painting and lm today) of any form of existence in a plural that the worlds can face on the surface of the earth but also in the sky. . . . The spiritualities of the Indigenous peoples, on the contrary, seem to situate the intentionality of the spirit at the very heart of matter, where man joins not only all the other forms of life, but also mineral, water, wind, re or the stars.” The title comes from the rst chapter of Barbara Glowczewski’s recent book, Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

These images from the storytelling session with Barbara Glowczewski were shown as part of the installation Matri Linear B. Part 2: Surfacing Earth , 2021.

CHAIRMAN OF MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA

Acting Minister of Culture and Sport

Miquel Iceta i Llorens

DIRECTOR OF THE MUSEUM

Manuel Segade

ROYAL BOARD OF TRUSTEES

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Isaac Sastre de Diego (Director General of Fine Arts)

Manuel Segade (Museum Director)

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Tomasa Hernández Martín (Regional Minister of Presidency, Home A airs, and Culture of the Goverment of Aragón)

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Horacio Umpierrez Sánchez (Regional Deputy Minister of Culture and Cultural Heritage of the Government of the Canary Islands)

Pilar Lladó Arburúa

(President of Fundación Amigos del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía)

Elective Trustees

Pedro Argüelles Salaverría

Ana Patricia Botín Sanz de Sautuola O’Shea (Banco Santander)

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Antonio Huertas Mejías (FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE)

Carlos Lamela de Vargas

Isabelle Le Galo Flores

Rafael Mateu de Ros

Ute Meta Bauer

Marta Ortega Pérez (Inditex)

María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop

Ana María Pilar Vallés Blasco

Honorary Trustees

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Guillermo de la Dehesa

Óscar Fanjul Martín

Ricardo Martí Fluxá

Claude Ruiz Picasso †

Carlos Solchaga Catalán

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Guadalupe Herranz Escudero

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

María de Corral

João Fernandes

Amanda de la Garza

Inés Katzenstein

Chus Martínez

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Vicente Todolí

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Juan Herreros

Andrés Jaque

Marina Otero Verzier

MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA

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RESTORATION

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This book is published to coincide with the exhibition Angela Melitopoulos. Cine(so)matrix, organized by the Museo Reina Sofía from June 14 to September 18, 2023

EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION CONCEPT

Angela Melitopoulos

GRAPHIC CONCEPT

José Délano

DESIGN AND SOUND DIRECTION

Nicholas Bussman

PROJECT DIRECTOR

Teresa Velázquez

COORDINATION

Fernando López

Ana Lázaro

MANAGEMENT

Natalia Guaza

ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT

Nieves Fernández

DESIGN

Marta Banach

REGISTRAR

Iliana Naranjo

CONSERVATION

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TRANSLATIONS

Lambe & Nieto

SHIPPING

Crisóstomo Transportes

INSTALLATION

Intervento 2 S.L.

LIGHTING

Toni Rueda

Urbia Services

PUBLICATION

Book published by the Editorial Activities Department of the Museo Reina Sofía

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Alicia Pinteño Granado

EDITORIAL COORDINATION

Jone Aranzabal Itoiz

TRANSLATIONS

From Spanish to English

Jethro Soutar, 7–11

From German to English

Carolyn Wooding, 16–23; 72–83; 184–195

From French to English

Carolyn Wooding, 138–145

TRANSCRIPTION

Mela Dávila-Freire, 16–23

COPYEDITING AND PROOFREADING

Tess Rankin

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Estudio Ponce Contreras

PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT

Julio López

ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT

Victoria Wizner

PLATES

La Troupe

PRINTING AND BINDING

Artes Grá cas Palermo

© This edition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2023

Essays, BY-NC-ND 4.0 International

© Reprint, Kerstin Schroedinger, EMAF

Introduction texts for each artwork, Angela Melitopoulos; copyediting, Kerstin Schroedinger.

© Images, Angela Melitopoulos, VEGAP, Madrid, 2023

© Photographs, the authors

© 14–15; 24–25; 84–85; 146–147; 196-197: José Délano

© 44–47: Concept and Realization, Angela Melitopoulos; Graphic Design, Peter Hammesfahr

© 96–101: Concept and Realization, Angela Melitopoulos, Angela Anderson; Graphic Design, Pierre Maite

We are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others. While all reasonable e orts have been made to state copyright holders of material used in this work, any oversight will be corrected in future editions, provided the Publishers have been duly informed.

ISBN: 978-84-8026-644-4

NIPO: 828-23-005-9

D.L.: M-30663-2023

Catalogue of o cial publications

https://cpage.mpr.gob.es

This book has been printed in:

Cover: Arena Smooth White 300 gsm

Inside: Arena Smooth White 120 gsm 190 x 265 mm 252 pp.

PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS

Angela Melitopoulos: cover; 2; 5; 26–27; 32–41; 52–59; 63–71; 86–87; 92–95; 102–103; 108–111; 116–125; 132–137; 148–149; 154–159; 164–171; 176–183; 200–201; 206–219; 224–233; 238–239; 242–245

Kerstin Schroedinger: 50

Nils Klinger: 62 (documenta14)

Joaquín Cortés and Román Lores, Museo Reina Sofía: 14–15; 30–31; 51; 90–91; 106–107; 112–113; 128–131; 152–153; 162–163; 174–175; 204–205; 222–223