ARTIST TALK / FILM SCREENING
KJØPMANNSGATA UNG KUNST, 11. APRIL, 16:00 – 17:30
Gratis inngang.
Kuratorer: Zane Cerpina, Espen Gangvik
Bunkeridylle [2023]
Digital video, 11‘56“, 2.39:1
5.1 sound, Dutch / English
“Bunkeridylle” engages with technologies of violence, in relation to weapon systems, oppression, and resistance. Set in a nearby future that may at first sight look rather retro, or even primitive, the film takes its starting point from two questions: How can the techniques of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) made with everyday digital appliances – which are frequently used by terrorists – be reclaimed to build non-violent weapons to attack an oppressive power? How can folklore, nostalgia, and regionalism be re-imagined beyond their usual associations with conservatism and right-wing exclusionism, and thus become a stimulus to re-appropriate globalized high-tech culture?
Two fragments by French postmodern philosophers Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard are narrated in the regional dialect of the Dutch province of Zeeland, unsettling the commonplace derogatory association of regional dialects with simplicity and backwardness. The protagonists of the film speak in this dialect, while their foreign accents suggest that they are migrants, rather than part of a “native population”. They navigate a world in which space and time have contracted, as Virilio argues in his reflection on the technological significance of WW2 bunkers: they appear to live in the technological past, present, and future simultaneously.
Drawing from Baudrillard’s argument that one should not attack an oppressive power on its own terms, but with a symbolic “gift”, they build a 1:1-scale IED-version of the Fat Man atomic bomb. Rather than trying to replicate the destructive power of the original bomb (as a conventional IED would do), it pushes the latter’s perverse aesthetic dimension to the extreme: a spectacular silver shiny object is inflated with air when detonated. State security forces arrive at the scene, but don’t know how to respond, other than by blocking the perimeter.
Dani Ploeger [UK/NL/DE]
Dani Ploeger is an artist and cultural critic who explores situations of conflict and crisis on the fringes of the world of high-tech consumerism. His work spans a broad range of forms, from media art, installations, and film to performance art, anarchist engineering, and cultural theory. It is often informed by field research on the use of everyday technologies under extraordinary circumstances. He has made a VR installation while accompanying frontline troops in the Russo-Ukrainian war, travelled to dump sites in Nigeria to collect electronic waste originating from Europe, and stolen razor wire from the so-called ‘high-tech fence’ on the EU outer border in Hungary. He is currently working on the development of anarchist technologies for the Rojava Revolution in North-East Syria.
Dani’s artwork has been exhibited worldwide, including at ZKM Karlsruhe, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Nairobi National Museum, the London Film Festival, the Eunam Museum of Art, the Lviv Museum of Ethnography, and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. His book Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences: Everyday technologies in extreme circumstances was published with Triarchy Press in 2021.
Dani holds a PhD from the University of Sussex (UK) and is currently Professor of Performance and Technology at the University of Music and Theatre Munich. He is also Artistic Director of Fabricatie – a platform for art and industry in the Netherlands, and a Fellow at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. In 2022, he initiated the Rojava Center for Democratic Technologies in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
www.daniploeger.org / https://v2.nl/publications/destructive-circuits
