Screening with “Rebecca and her daughters” by Shifra Osorio Whewell and “Agents” by Anastasia Sosunova
took place on 26. February 2023 at Plast, Stannebeinplatz 7, Leipzig
entrance of screening at Plast, Leipzig 2023
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cushions for seating during screening at Plast, Leipzig 2023
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room during screening at Plast, Leipzig 2023
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“Agents” by Anastasia Sosunova at Plast, Leipzig 2023
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conversation with Fishra, following screening of “Rebecca and her daughters” at Plast, Leipzig 2023
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Texts by Lena Schmidt
Agents
In a frail blue morning hour
we see through the hole in a stylized wooden face
depicted in a stylized way and
the hole reveals something
yet
unseen
A young artist and an old artisan
As they sit in the front seats of a car,
and act in a trojan manner; speaking quietly,
a conspiracy kind of quiet
they seem to hide in the belly of their vehicle which
waylays in the guts of a forest that slowly
digests the ideas of its peoples
its materials
they whisper, hoarsely,
as they ambush the agent of folk art
in its thick and steady flux
seamlessly, seemingly without any agenda
the winged wooden creature
– a trojan horse, a golem, an angel of history –
passes by
they discuss its disguise
its different shapes:
A grasshopper, a folkloristic heroine, a lover, a shoe, a Jesus
against time
it moves within the symbolic realm that spans
in between real time and a crafted past
moving almost unnoticed through the landscape
that changed its modes of production over time
And changed time through the modes of its production –
While traditional folk dancers are doing their formations around them
stepping in and out of an imaginary circle, producing their own time
Its movement is unnaturally determined
like a reversed scene
anachronistic knowledge
that lingers through the gaze,
becoming innocent when reversed
stepping in and out of time
The artist and the artisan finesse their gaze
with rough cuts, sharp questions
The artist asks questions to unmask masks
How innocent or guilty are the shapes, the figures, the gods
If they are the products of people's thoughts
how innocent or guilty the godmakers, the godcreators, godshapers,
If they are but showing society its own faces
on demand
The artisan's voice is raspy,
a trojan kind of hoarse, really
meaning: the hollowed lungs must have been filled with sawdust
throughout the time
“Agents” is about the agency of folk art and
about animated wood:
meaning: a 3D-animation of a wooden creature, contemporary sleek
meaning: a wooden figure, moving through time or being moved through time
meaning: this wood is alive, but what makes it real?
Everything is hidden: the anima and its whereabouts, its hideouts,
the transition, the moving figure, what moves it and where to
the artist and the artisan are hiding to find the hidden
Agents has more layers than a trojan horse, it rather is a moving matrioschka
ideology carved into timber, turning into idolatry
Its movement is hardly noticeable and determined by
its creators, the god-makers,
hoarse voices,
trojan horses
Rebecca & Her Daughters
Watching the newsical Rebecca & Her Daughters, I understand what is meant by the title mingling with againness.
A book lies on the table. The cover reveals its sanctity, the spectator can read the golden letters
headfirst, forming the title “THE HOLY BIBLE” – the hands which just opened the book now
hastily search for one specific page. Once they found it, they tear a hole in the page. A face
appears from the paper void and proclaims gently:
“Ah – be thou the mother of thousands of millions.” “let thy seeds possess the gates of those
which hate them.”
In the next sequence, a newsreader that seems to have fallen out of time – the setting and
makeup make me think of the 80es – declares „Good evening. It is July the 13th, 1843 and mobs of farmers and their workers in rural Wales are dressed as the biblical figure of Rebecca to march on the tollgates in what's come to be knows as the Rebecca Riots.“ Faint marching drums accompany her speech. She presents nowness, againness or history, “presenting” as in: bringing past to present, over and over, in rhythmic recollections, montage, puns and poetry, drag and melody.
We then witness a spectacular show of biblical cross-dressing, historical acrobatics, a flamboyant composition of news that were found in an echo chamber of history. Againness: a quote can become a void: a gaping gash, a mouth, spilling, singing, cursing loud? I think, the news might be growing from seeds of the past.
I am not surprised about the poet-farmers, about the rhymes, about the newsreader brushes time against its grain.
In his theses on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin writes:
“The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the
crude and material things, without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.“
The News are composed as historical drag: the past cross-dressing as present, or vice versa. The monads brought together in constellation webs, a construction site and a demonstration site suddenly lookalike. Gates clapping, swallowing money and spilling out words,
and revolution is a demolition, reversed. Boiling up hate, and building up gates,
Tearing paper, tearing walls: The poet-farmers deem the police as grasshoppers, themselves as
seeds and the seeds as daughters of Rebecca
I think of things that leap throughout history: references, quotes, grasshoppers, rioters, the
flickering, hiccuping footage of protests in different times and spheres.
Walter Benjamin wrote:
“Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands.”
– There jumps the executive: in the style of a grasshopper –
“The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the Revolution.”
There you have Rebecca’s Daughters jumping across the fences, crossing the turnpikes, crossing the dress codes of their assigned gender, crossing the gates of their assigned class and leaping acrobatically across the centuries, materials, footage.
The turnpike sings to the rhythmical sounds of cash money. It opens its mouth to swallow metal
coins, to sing along with brass trumpets trombones. It cuts and claps. In the echoing abyss of its
mouth, a hole that opens up where the stories reverberate:
“For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns
threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with
throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)”
For every second of time was the straight gate through which [Messiah] (– you might choose to say “a Revolution” instead –) might enter.
Fishra (Shifra Osorio Whewell) drinks old stories, stirs them up with the outrageous/wonderful/bad shit that goes on under our noses and spits them out: the bitter-sweet spot between hymn and public broadcast danger warning. She likes words. Phonically, meaningfully, in sense and nonsense. Working with video, text, props, sound, music, performance --- it's all about the mixing together of these things into a hotpot. Fishra aims to exalt the local; to harness the transformative and emancipatory force of fantasy fiction; to use old and new narratives to let us interpret our experience and ultimately give us joyous and indignant agency in the world.
Anastasia Sosunova is a visual artist based in Vilnius. Sosunova’s multidisciplinary
practice, combining video, installation, graphics and sculpture, grows from personal
histories and their entanglements within broader cultural, economical and spiritual
structures. Her work focuses in particular on the bonds around which communities are
forged, from local vernacular art to social neighborhoods to religious organisations. She
observes how these closed groups are developed, often in reaction to other values or
beings, and how they subsist through shared sentiments and the development of rituals,
traditions and collective agreements.
Through a process of distortion and the interweaving of elements belonging to old
mythologies, hybrid entities and the surveillance society, Sosunova creates alternative
forms of ‘contemporary folklore’. Spanning lifestyle concepts to pillars of belief, these
new folklores are at once a play with notions of home and belonging, a questioning of
existence and coexistence, and a critical view on structures of power and the psychology
of collectivity. Her work serves as a proposition for new ways of living by rules, ethics,
codes and agreements between beings.
Lena Schmidt *1995 in Leipzig, studied Studium Individuale at Leuphana University and
Literary Writing at the German Literature Institute Leipzig. Further academic research was conducted in Bordeaux in the field of film studies, in Jerusalem with two research fellowships at the Hebrew University and in Vienna at the Institute for Language Arts in the University for Applied Arts. She works as a literary translator and author, mostly of essays and poetry.
I do so, and I see:
is a runaway pastor child, (vocal) artist, writer and lucid dreamer living in the Netherlands. Working with themes such as displacement, devotion and lamentation. Her texts can be seen as assemblages transmitting spirit, sound, voices and words in an attempt to leave the listener spellbound. Using unintelligibility and the mix-match of languages to open up disruptive, creative and musical possibilities.
(*Seoul) is an interdisciplinary artist working and living in Leipzig. She holds a Diploma in Media Arts from Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and is the owner of the Café and Bakery Cha Cha Flower Cakes. Her practices are focussed on notions of grief, transiency, and volatility, which manifests in site-specific installations and her conceptual food practice.
