Embryonic Elements of Freedom Spatial video installation
Artists- Award
- Award in Category "Individual Artist"
The spatial video installation „Embryonic Elements of Fredom“ takes the social upheavals of the early Renaissance as the starting point for a narrative about mass media, power and resistance that transcends time. The work reactivates and examines myths, documents, revolutionary texts and propaganda from the time of the Peasants‘ Wars around 1525 and places them in a timeless context. The pamphlet of the 12 Peasant Articles as early printed matter forms a narrative and conceptual focal point: the media revolution of book printing as a „new“ medium of the time and its influence on the reorganization of social power relations is set in relation to more recent political events such as the Arab Spring and the role of early smartphones and social media. Intermediate sequences take the narrative back to the court of Bao Zheng, who became a heroic figure through his commitment to the peasantry around the year 1000 (parallel to the invention of paper and book printing in China). Text and libretto for the spatial sound composition interweave multilingual texts from verbal battles between opposing factions of the Peasants‘ War, fragments from historical chronicles (the Snail Controversy, the Weinsberg Bloody Deed), protest slogans from the Arab Spring (triggered by the harassment of a greengrocer), texts from Bao Zheng scenes from Chinese opera and TV series as well as from reformers and political revolutionaries. In a key scene, a historical identification of the peasant movement of 1525 as an “embryonic proletarian element” by Friedrich Engels is invoked vocally (mezzo-soprano: Hasti Molavian), formulated in Engel‘s socio-historical and simultaneously encouraging analysis “The German Peasants‘ War”, written in the wake of the equally failed revolution of 1848.