Catalogue > At random

A film shot in Cuba. Not an anthropological film, nor a narrative documentary or a film essay, but certainly a film concerned with foreignness and difference. Mostly shot in the hilly communes of Yateras, searching for long disappeared clandestine settlements, so-called palenque, where African slaves, Taínos and Chinese forced laborers, freed themselves from colonial violence, the film narrates a sense of place, which is real and imaginary at the same time. It questions, if it possible to communicate something of the soul of a place, steeped in histories of revolution and dissidence, without relying on didacticism or storytelling, without taking recourse on hierarchical distinctions between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the animate and the inanimate, the macro and the micro? Wondering what heritage (colonial) anthropology leaves behind, or rather, if it is possible to escape from the systems of signification that constitute foreignness, without getting detached from the palpable realities of the world? What if there was a way to approach the foreign by relying on the affects of the world that pass through us, giving way to perceptive cartographies, mapping out nameless intensities and collective sensitivities, leaving space for the non-human, including vegetables and animals that colonized the New Land? In this film, Cuba does not appear as an “outside” to a “Western” inside, but as a sensible texture without anchor or vanishing point, where humans are a part of the composition rather than the principal element.

Elke Marhöfer, born in the year of the goat in Baracoa/Cuba, studied Fine Art at the University of the Arts in Berlin, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York City. Via the potentialities of moving image and suppositious writing Marhöfer works with notions of self-admitted foreignness, radical othering, heterogeneous perceptions of time, the ahistorical and disorientations of narratives. She revises notions of animal, vegetal and object relations. Since 2010 she pursues a PhD at the University of Gothenburg. Projects have received fellowships, grants, and generous support from Courtisane Festival Ghent, Images Film Festival Toronto, IASPIS Residency, Whitney Independent Study Program, Cité des Art International Paris. Art exhibitions include the Manufactura`s Studio Wuhan, FCAC Shanghai, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen and The Showroom, London.