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“otjesd” Clemens von Wedemeyer In “otjesd” Clemens von Wedemeyer has recreated situations of waiting in front the German Consulate in Moscow in a peripheral quarter in Berlin with Russian migrants. This production was preceded by observations and film research at the visa application offices in Berlin and Moscow. The dialogues and the scenarios – people waiting, others offering economy trips, the staff sitting at folding tables outside to help fill out forms, or a large sign are based on these observations. Transposed into film, these situations glide past like an absurd fairy tale or a dream. The camera work – a single slow pan – and the warm artificial light contribute to this impression. In one of the first scenes a man recites a poem by Majakowski in the middle of the forest, while a young woman in a pink anorak looks for a place for her bag, which she apparently cannot take with her. The camera follows the young woman: her ID is checked, she comes into conflict with the people waiting, they berate her and she leaves without getting rid of her bag. With the change of locations (Berlin/Moscow) and quotations from the history of film, the artist and film theoretician Clemens von Wedemeyer tests how much fiction is needed to depict realities. Cinematically far removed from the documentary and more in the format of the cinema of illusions, in “Weggang” Wedemeyer uses fragments of a reality to focus on the surreal experience of border bureaucracy. The film imagines an endless loop, in which the protagonists who want to leave their country appear to be caught. Wandering around between figures in a birch grove – reminiscent of Russia – , a passing train, or the absurdity of the bureaucratic apparatus in its mixture of improvisation and demonstrations of power allude to the everyday practice of immobilizing non-EU citizens. Artist, born 1974, lives and works in Leipzig and Berlin. |
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