The Berlin-based artist duo Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani has been collaborating on their interventional and situationist art practice since 1995. Their investigations revolve around moving images as both impartial documents and involved narrations of our changing societies. The main protagonists of their projects are often urban spaces that bear the burden of collective memory, upon which the forces of historical transition and turmoil have been engraved. The artists’ poetic-filmic and performative investigations of these sites tackle the idea of revisiting blind spots in contemporary society through their artistic reanimation of such places.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani will introduce two of their experimental documentary films and lead a discussion with the audience after their screening. The two short films are Freedom of Movement (2018) and Appropriation takes you on a weird ride (2020).

Freedom of Movement

Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
30 min., Germany 2018
HD, German with English subtitles

Evoking the Olympic marathon from Rome 1960, in which the Ethiopian Abebe Bikila conquered the African continent’s first gold medal, running barefoot and becoming a sporting legend and a symbol of the Africa that was freeing itself of colonialism, Fischer & el Sani have recontextualised amidst Rome’s controversial rationalist architecture, a new race involving refugees and immigrants staking a claim to their “freedom of movement”. Fischer & el Sani are examining the complexity of ideological, political and architectural implications of Bikila‘s 1960‘s Olympic gold medal run to this day.

Watch the trailer here.

Appropriation takes you on a weird ride

Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani
20 min., Germany 2020
4K, German with English subtitles

"Appropriation takes you on a weird ride" investigates the strange German enthusiasm for Native Americans in relation to contemporary racism and its deep colonial roots. This fascination, especially with regard to the construction of a German identity, has a rather frightening than impressive chronology: it begins with the first-century Germanic Cherusci chieftan Arminius and stretches to the adventure novels of Karl May and the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows in the 1800s, through the ethnographic exhibitions (Völkerschauen) in zoos and circuses and founding of “Indian clubs" at the turn of the twentieth century, onward to the appropriation of Indigenous identities by Nazi ideologists, up until the present day, when new rightwing groups have developed an unsettling identification with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.

Watch the trailer here.

In cooperation with Villa Aurora.