Location: Sports field, opposite Kunst Raum Mitte (Auguststraße 21)
Free admission 

The open-air screening will take place on the sports field opposite Kunst Raum Mitte and will feature films by Julia Charlotte Richter, Mykola Ridnyi, and Anna Zett (Research Residency). These films open our eyes to forms of community that challenge history as an objective past; instead, they visualize and re-explore it through moments of gathering. They center the perspectives of young people: their youth represents both entering into predetermined structures and rejecting them. Through this lens, resilience and protest are practiced, performed, and achieved by using pop culture to make history present and the incomprehensible tangible.

The screening will begin with an artist talk featuring Julia Charlotte Richter and Anna Zett.

6:30 – 7:30 pm Artist Talk

Julia Charlotte Richter and Anna Zett (in German)

8 – 9 pm Screening

Anna Zett, Es gibt keine Angst, 2023 (31 min., German with English subtitles)
Julia Charlotte Richter, Training, 2014 (8 min., English)
Mykola Ridnyi, The Battle Over Mazepa, 2023 (27 min., English with English subtitles)

Anna Zett, Es gibt keine Angst (Afraid doesn’t exist), 2023

In the Berlin archive of the GDR opposition, Anna Zett traces remembered and forgotten fears from her childhood. The artist interweaves audiovisual archival material and samizdat from the final days of the police state with a stirring collage of underground music from the late GDR (composition by Matti Gajek). She combines video recordings of activists from the Umweltbibliothek, the New Forum, and the punk scene with fragments from the televised revolution and highly condensed voices from a poetry cassette recorded in 1986, creating an associative and intimate narrative. In an relentless escalation, this archive thriller leads to the second occupation of the Berlin Stasi headquarters, accompanied by a hunger strike in September 1990—a far-reaching yet scarcely known political event today. There’s fear. There’s anger. There are people who insist on achieving emotional connection and political self-determination despite profound experiences of violence. Es gibt keine Angst opens up a pulsating resonance chamber that lingers long after its conclusion.

Julia Charlotte Richter, Training, 2014

The video work Training explores forms of protest and addresses the role of female* activism among young girls in Georgia. The work shows an intimate atmosphere of preparation, exploration, and rebellion, asking: What remains for these girls apart from the seemingly naive and childish attempt to fight for change? An important aspect of Julia Charlotte Richter’s work is the future prospects and the social conditions that shape the lives of young people.

Mykola RIdnyi, The Battle Over Mazepa, 2023

The Battle Over Mazepa deals with the historical significance and contemporary perception of Ivan Mazepa, a political and military leader of the Zaporozhian Sitsch and Ukraine to the left of the Dnipro in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Ridnyi borrows the popular form of the rap battle from hip-hop culture to bring together two great works of world literature associated with this historical figure: Lord Byron’s Mazeppa (1819) and Alexander Pushkin’s Poltava (1828-29). While Byron depicts Mazepa as a love-obsessed romantic hero, Pushkin portrays him as a traitor from the colonial perspective of the Russian Empire. As part of his work on the film, Mykola Ridnyi invited Susanne Strätling, Professor of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, to collaborate with four rap performers in deconstructing the idealized and imperialistic Mazepa narratives of the two poems and creating a modern interpretation. The performers— Elie, Moh, Caxxianne, and Exo—represent different styles of hip-hop culture and spoken word performance. The resulting verses blend historical themes with contemporary sentiments, highlighting the urgency of events that occurred centuries ago and their resonance in today’s global world.

The Battle Over Mazepa is realized with support by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe (Ad-hoc Fellowship) in collaboration with the Berlin Artistic Research Programme.