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The Nazis set up a concentration camp in Ebensee. Nürnberg and Peuker wonder what conclusions they can draw from the topography about dealing with the past. The takes remain static; a woman’s voice dryly contributing information from off screen is all that clarifies the context within contemporary history. A site that looks like a dirt road turns out to be the “Löwengang (Lion’s Walk),” which the camp’s prisoners were driven down like animals to reach a tunnel that had to be dug. As soon as the film moves to the residential area that was founded on the site of the concentration camp shortly after the end of the war, surprise at the lack of sensitivity in dealing with the past mixes into the off-screen commentary. What Zement aims to get at is the ambiguity of this proximity of commemorative site and settlement.

Dirk Peuker * 1970 in Friedrichroda 1998 – 2005 Studium experimentelle Filmgestaltung an der Universität der Künste Berlin und bildende Kunst an der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. 2006 Stipendium der Stiftung Kulturregion Hannover und der Nordmedia Filmförderung, Villa Minimo. 2007 DAAD Jahresstipendium 2008 Postgraduiertenstipendium des Freistaates Thüringen 2008 Meisterschüler der Universität der Künste Berlin 2009 NaFÖG Stipendium des Berliner Senats seit 2009 künstlerischer Mitarbeiter an der Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee

The town of Fungurume is situated in the province of Katanga (D.R. Congo) and the hills and mountains surrounding Fungurume form one of the world’s largest copper and cobalt deposits. In pre-colonial times the area was already a major centre in the copper trading network that ran across Central Africa. Today the mountains have become the property of the American Tenke Fungurume Mining consortium (TFM). From 2009 on, TFM’s mining activities have been in full swing, causing the resettlement of thousands of local Sanga inhabitants. Pungulume focuses on Sanga chief Mpala and his court elders while they are rendering the oral history of the Sanga people, against the backdrop of the industrial destruction of the landscape that anchors Sanga memory and identity. (Filip De Boeck)

Sammy Baloji was born in 1978 in Lubumbashi, in the Katanga province of Democratic Republic of Congo. He studied Computer and Information Sciences and Communication at the University of Lubumbashi. With a borrowed camera, he began photographing scenes as sources for his cartoons. He soon enrolled in photography courses in DRC, and continued with photography and video at Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, in Strasbourg, France. Baloji juxtaposes photographic realities, combining past and present, the real and the ideal, to illicit glaring cultural and historical tensions. He explores architecture and the human body as traces of social history, sites of memory, and witnesses to operations of power. Baloji has had solo exhibitions at Musée du quad Branly (Paris), MuZee (Oostende), Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren), WIELS (Brussels) and Museum for African Art (NY). Baloji has featured in numerous group exhibitions worldwide: Biennale de Lyon, Venice Biennale, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Foundation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain,... He has been the recipient of numerous awards including, the 2014 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative award, partnering with Olafur Eliasson. He was nominated a Prix Pictet finalist in 2009, received the Prince Claus Award in 2008 and two awards at the 2007 African Photography Biennial in Bamako, Mali.

Drawn by her interest in history and architecture and the ambiguity emerging from modernist utopias, the Belgian artist Sophie Nys left in January 2011 for Rio de Janeiro to shoot the film ?Parque do Flamengo?. From this a semi-documentary resulted whose main character is the Parque do Flamengo, a park designed by the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx between 1954 and 1959. Simultaneously a painter, sculptor, poet and botanist, Roberto Burle Marx is known worldwide as one of the greatest landscape architects of the twentieth century. The film by Sophie Nys is a 45 minutes uncut travelling shot and represents the whole of the park as an isolated entity. The space is crossed from A to Z at a walking pace. As a stroll, the route follows the curved and sensual line of the park. The film is a physical and plastic portrait of the place, a recording of a living space between culture and nature. At Sophie Nys?s request, musician Arto Lindsay conceived an original soundtrack for the film, using the list of plants featured in the park as a starting point for this new composition.

Sophie Nys (º1974, Borgerhout) studied at Sint-Lukas Ghent and finished a post-graduate program at Jan van Eyck in Maastricht. She brings conceptual and minimalistic artistic strategies to their logical and formal limits by exploiting the broad artistic license possible within the contemporary art milieu. Far from being flippant, her works ? although seemingly ironic ? maintain their eloquence as poetic reflections on her subjects derived from the everyday. Her films have been shown at International Short Film Festival Detmold, FIDMarseille, BOZAR, e-flux, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Argos, Courtisane festival,...