Films A to Z
The Song of the Shirt
- Runtime:
- 46 min.
- Year of Production:
- 2020
- Country:
- Germany
- Director:
- Cast:
- Maha Maamoun
Omnia Sabry - Production Company:
- Berlinale Section:
- Forum Expanded
- Berlinale Category:
- Experimental Film
The work departs from Ernst Toller’s play “Die Maschinenstürmer” (1922), but relocates its themes along the remnants and ruins of the cotton industry, in post-2011 Egypt and post-industrial Poland. Actualizing a criticism of technology, the film re-reads the Luddites movement for a contemporary body of the worker that is always already informed by the histories of technological progress. Filmed in one continuous shot, the movements of a seamstress, a projectionist, the screen maker and the film crew as the choir seek to find ways to intervene in the cyclic structure, possible disruptions, torn between the historical continuity and an urge to deviate the progressive form. Slow down, stop, don’t proceed.
Projections on off-white cotton screens document production methods in the fields of cotton agriculture, weaving, processing, sewing, and storytelling—all narrative structures that can tell us about complex social changes in everyday life experiences. In a counter- narrative, two voices seek out subverted forms of sabotage, practices of weaving the stories and telling the textiles that may be (to quote Haraway) “making practices, pedagogical practices, and cosmological performances.” (Kerstin Schroedinger)
BIOGRAFIE Kerstin Schroedinger
Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist currently based in Zurich, Switzerland. She works with video, sound, and text with a histographic practice, questioning the means of production, historical continuities, and the ideological certainties of representation. She received a diploma in Visual Communication/Media at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in 2007, and a MRes in Aural and Visual Cultures/Art History at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2010, where she has also been a guest lecturer at the Centre for Research Architecture since 2008. She is also
a teaching assistant at Zurich University of the Arts. Her artistic and curatorial practice is collaborative.
FILMOGRAFIE Kerstin Schroedinger (selection)
2020 The Song of the Shirt
2015 Fugue
2014 Rainbow's Gravity
2011 Red, she said
2010 Translating the other
2010 Rigid things can always be moved about
2009 as found
2007 anstatt dass
2004 Das Monument
Interview with Kerstin Schroedinger, director THE SONG OF THE SHIRT