Looking at Buildings. Harun Farocki’s Architectures

The interest in architecture informs Harun Farocki’s work on different levels. The observational film Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (2013) and the study on brick production In Comparison (2009) are direct expressions of this, but works such as Prison Images (2000) or The Creators of the Shopping Worlds (2001) also revolve around the relationship between built space, media technologies, and social conditioning.

In the workshop, three approaches to “Harun Farocki’s Architectures” will be presented and discussed. It starts with the screening and discussion of an unfinished film with the working title “House”, which Farocki shot in 1982/83. It documents one of the early renovations of an “Altbau” in West Berlin. The 16mm footage, found in the archives of the Harun Farocki Institut, was recently digitized together with two equally unfinished architectural spots for “Sesame Street” from 1977.

In the afternoon, three short inputs on Farocki’s engagement with architecture and urban space follow: Volker Pantenburg focuses on the period between 1977 and 1985, in which WDR productions such as Industry and Photographie (1979) and Stadtbild (1981) were made; Tom Holert takes Farocki’s plan from 1999 to film the work of Rem Koolhaas and the “Office for Metropolitan Architecture” (OMA) to speculate about the relationship between consumerist and carceral designs as theorized by Farocki (and Koolhaas respectively); Luis Feduchi reflects on how Farocki’s appeal for architecture throughout his œuvre resonates with – perhaps anticipates – the shift that architectural representation has undergone in the last decades.

Ablauf

10:30 – 12:00
Screening und Diskussion
Haus (c. 1982-1984; 26 min, color)
Sesamstraße: Kinderhäuser (1977; 10 min, color)

– Pause –

13:00 – 14:00
Impuls und Diskussion Volker Pantenburg

14:15 – 15:15
Impuls und Diskussion Tom Holert

16:00 – 17:00
Impuls und Diskussion Luis Feduchi

Participants

Luis Feduchi is a practicing architect and academic based in Berlin. His practice focuses on exhibitions, archives and museum architecture as well as in heritage preservation. Since 2005 he has held a number of architecture professorships internationally. Throughout the years he has collaborated with filmmakers and installed the work or artists. Since 2018 he collaborates with the Harun Farocki GbR conducting workshops, designing shows, such as Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl | Life Captured Still, London, 2020, and more recently co-curating with Antje Ehmann the exhibition Labor in a Single Shot. Bucharest Berlin Warsaw.

Tom Holert is a writer and curator. In 2015, he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin, a platform for research and production after Farocki’s example. With Anselm Franke he curated the 2018 exhibition “Neolithic Childhood: Art in a False Present, c. 1930” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. He is the curator of “Education Shock,” a research and exhibition project on the spatial politics of education around the globe during the 1960s and 1970s, which was shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in the summer of 2021 and is currently on view at Vorarlberger Architektur Institut, Dornbirn.

Volker Pantenburg is professor for Film Studies at the University of Zürich. He has published on essayistic film and video practices, experimental cinema, and contemporary moving image installations. Book publications in English include Farocki/Godard. Film as Theory (2015), Cinematographic Objects. Things and Operations (2015, Editor) and Screen Dynamics. Mapping the Borders of Cinema (2012, Co-Editor). In 2015, he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin.