Starting Wednesday, 4 September 2019, at co. (company projects), the film program There is No Neutral Space introduces the writers, theoreticians, and artists who have been featured in Petunia or films that have been reviewed within the journal since 2009.

The film program paves the way for the upcoming symposium Passages – two days of discussions, screenings, lectures and performances – that takes place at co. (company projects) on Friday, 27 September 2019, and at Goethe in the Skyways on Saturday, 28 September 2019. Coinciding with the conclusion of both Goethe Pop Up Minneapolis Goethe in the Skyways and the dislocation of co. (company projects), the symposium’s aim is to invite critical feedback while reflecting on the notions of legacy, of transition, of commitment to the local, as well as of urban space/architectural environment.

Films are screened every Wednesday in September, 6.30 pm.

The screenings are free of charge.
Reserve a seat as space is limited via Eventbrite

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Wednesdays, 6.30pm

4 September 2019: Strange Days by Kathryn Bigelow

11 September 2019: Fulll Firearms by Emily Wardill & Palais de Justice (I choose also black) by Michelle Naismith

18 September 2019: Born in Flames by Lizzie Borden.

25 September 2019: Lady to Fox by Lili Reynaud Dewar, The Machine Room by Caroline Mesquita, Possessed and Home Sweet Ho(l)me(s) by Alexandra Midal, and Normal Work by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz.  Alexandra Midal, one of the filmmakers, will be present. She will also present and sign her most recent book, published by Sternberg Press and distributed by the MIT Press: Design by Accident. For a New History of Design.

The screenings are free of charge.
Reserve a seat as space is limited via Eventbrite

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Caroline Mesquita
The Machine Room, 2018, 12 min 20

The video displays a room filled with enigmatic devices, including the giant brass hand reminiscent of an oversized glove of a knight. The artist herself plays the role of a helpless victim of technology. Mesquita embodies a number of different personalities and professions as she changes clothing, hairstyles, and accessories that are, over and over, obliterated by coarse brushstrokes. Mesquita recalls spaces and events by capturing different scenarios and purposely blurring the line between fictional operations and realistic mise-en-scènes. (Courtesy of the artist)

Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz
Normal Work, 2007, 13 min

Hannah Cullwick not only cleaned from early in the morning to late in the evening in various households, she also produced a series of remarkable staged photographs, numerous diaries, and letters. These materials present her strength, her muscles, and her big, dirty hands: embodiments of her gender that were obviously directly connected with her working practices and which she was very proud of.
Hannah Cullwick´s portraits and self-portraits, which show her not only as a domestic servant, but also in “class drag” or “ethnic drag”, were part of a sadomasochistic relationship that she had with Arthur Mumby, a man from the bourgeois class. Interestingly, it was the elements of her hard work in the households that provided the material for their shared SM scenes. The work that Cullwick carried out as a domestic servant was later restaged together with Mumby in their meetings in his home.
The crossings of social positions that she staged in the photographs – which show her as a bourgeois woman, as a young bourgeois man, or as a slave – partly also play a role in Cullwick´s everyday life, for instance when she traveled with Arthur Mumby in “bourgeois drag”.
The photographs can be understood as a technology to control these crossings, or to reflect on the great efforts and constant deliberation that were connected to them. The film asks whether the crossings of social hierarchies of class, gender, and race that Hannah Cullwick staged and obviously desired have today become generalized into a paradoxical requirement in the field of labor. (Courtesy of the artists)

Alexandra Midal
Home Sweet Ho(l)me(s), 2019, 30 min

In 1896, Henry Howard Holmes, whose real name was Herman Webster Mudgett, the first serial killer in the United States, confessed to the dozens of crimes he had quietly committed in the imposing building he had built according to his secret plans in Chicago, a few miles from the most sophisticated slaughterhouses in the world. Lethal, practical and comfortable, it is equipped with the latest innovations. A cosy, rational and mechanical masterpiece of crime in slipper, Holmes, extreme designer, fits perfectly into the functionalist project of the modern world. Industrial revolution and serial killer? Far from being a coincidence, this merger heralds the emergence of new production methods, of which the assembly line and serial murder are two offshoots. The Holmes case illustrates the turning point that the economic, mechanical and cultural revolution has brought about in the treatment of living beings. (Courtesy of the artist)

Alexandra Midal
Possessed, 2018, 24 min

In the setting of a ghost town that had nearly 10,000 inhabitants during the gold rush, Possessed looks back at the chiasmus between objects considered subjects and slaves as things. But this situation was reversed following the 1851 London Universal Exhibition, and its promise of happiness for all, from which a rebellion in the form of haunted objects arose against the control of standardization. Possessed or possession, to whom do objects obey? (Courtesy of the artist)

Lili Reynaud Dewar
Lady to Fox, 2018, 6 min

The film is based on a novel, Lady Into Fox, by David Garnett. It’s a cruel love story and a satire of bourgeois values. A woman is suddenly changed into a fox. Her husband makes desperate efforts to keep their marriage going “as usual” despite the fact his wife is a vixen. He fails. The only way he will be able to reach her is by acting somewhat like an animal himself. (Courtesy of the artist)