MASA

The short film "Les exclus" appropriates figures, settings und texts from the Robert Bresson movie "Le diable probablement" (1976). The film continues to discuss the events in the French suburbs in November 2005. Together with friends, filmed in one day, it discuses the language of politics. Who and what determents an event? What kind of ability motivated the young people in their action? And if the real, that else wise seams to be invisible, got visible for a short period of time?

The narration of the second film "nowt/sooner" goes back to a short novel by Marguerite Duras "Ah! Ernesto" and tells the story of a child, that refuses to continue to go to school, because it doesn't want to learn what it doesn't know yet. The adaptation examines the relation between subjective and objective language use, between voice and language by the means of different speeches (rap/classic), to make use of the poly-lingualism of one's own language, to oppose the oppressive quality of language, to find points of non-culture or underdevelopment - linguistic "Third World zones" by which a language can escape, an animal enters into things.

Both films question the institutionalization and the non-institutionalization of young people. nowt/sooner asks questions around compulsory education and a school system that doesn’t give information, but allocates coordinates and reproduces class hierarchies. And Les exclus originates from the events in France, when it became obvious that institutionalization young persons in schools or in workstations is not demanded by the rest of the society and where the institutions account for the phenomenon of exclusion.

Elke Marhöfer makes films, drawings and performances. She searches for emancipative moments, contemporary and historical, to investigate the relationship between history and politics. She has an appetite for militancy. Leaving the distanced critical role behind, she follows through on temptations fraught with contradiction - health regimes, representations of dead or undead political actions all to root out new communicative strategies. By joining others in collaboration, she has become a medium against the notion of the producer. Forgetting how 'to make' in order to better learn how 'to practice'. Practicing to be alive together. Against the death blows of advanced capitalism, 'to practice' becomes 'to struggle'. What does the art world do with this? Some works have been shown in festivals, biennales and museums.

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