“Travelling is Impossible: Harun, Kodwo, and I,” films by Harun Farocki and the Black Audio Film Collective, presented by Kodwo Eshun. Organized by the Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan at Cinema Empire Sofil, Beirut, March 23–26, 2006. Preoccupied as I was with presenting three films by Black Audio Film Collective, I was unprepared for the impact of watching double and triple bills of Farocki films over two consecutive nights followed by a quadruple bill over 6 hours and 30 minutes.
These exhibitions were Harun Farocki, “Three Early Films,” curated by Bart van der Heide, Antje Ehmann, and myself at Cubitt Gallery from January 17 to February 22, 2009; Harun Farocki, “Against What? Against Whom?,” curated by Alex Sainsbury at Raven Row from November 2009 to February 7, 2010; and Harun Farocki, “22 Films 1968–2009,” curated by Stuart Comer, Antje Ehmann, and The Otolith Group at Tate Modern from November 13 to December 6, 2009. Two weeks into “22 Films,” Comer showed me an email he received from a well-known structuralist filmmaker dismissing Farocki’s films as mere “television” and cautioning him to “remember who his friends were” and “which side he was on.”
I discern Farockian thinking in projects and exhibitions such as “Anthropocene Observatory – The Dark Abyss of Time” by Armin Linke, John Palmesino, and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and Anselm Franke, 2013–ongoing at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin; “Travelling Communiqué” at the Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade, conceived and curated by Armin Linke, Doreen Mende, and Milica Tomic, 2014; “Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, curated by Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman, 2014; “1979: A Monument to Radical Instants” at La Virreina, Barcelona, curated by Carles Guerra, 2011; and “The Potosi Principle” at Reina Sofia, Madrid, curated by Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, 2010.
Nicole Brenez, “Harun Farocki and the Romantic Genesis of the Principle of Visual Critique,” in Harun Farocki: Against What? Against Whom?, eds. Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun (London: Raven Row, 2009), 128.
Pier Paolo Pasolini: corpi e luoghi, a cura di Michele Mancini e Giuseppe Perrela (Theorema edizioni, 1981). Mancini and Perrela worked with Laura Betti for three years to complete the text, and founded their own publishing imprint, Theorema edizione, in order to publish what the editors described as an “antropologiche di corpi e di luoghi” in the form of an “archiviazione di set cinematografici.” Ehmann and Farocki write that the frames are extracted from all twenty-one of Pasolini’s films, although Pasolini’s films actually number twenty-two.
Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann, “Kino wie noch nie,” in Kino wie noch nie, eds. Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki (Cologne: Generali Foundation and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Koenig, 2006), 17. Curated by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann at Generali Foundation from January 20 to April 23, 2006, the exhibition travelled to Akademie der Kunst in Berlin in May 2007. John Akomfrah, Anjalika Sagar, and I visited “Kino wie noch nie” with Farocki and Ehmann in May 26, 2007. The title “Kino wie noch nie” is an homage to Helmuth Costard’s masterpiece Fussball wie noch nie (1970), in which six cameras follow George Best throughout a Manchester United match.
Raymond Bellour, “The Unattainable Text” (1975), in Kino wie noch nie, eds. Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, 118.
So exhaustive indeed that I have never reached the conclusion of Pier Paolo Pasolini: corpi e luoghi since acquiring a copy at Donlon Books when it was still at Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, in 2010. It cost £70, which made it the most expensive book I had ever bought, at that time. To this day, I have yet to see the sequences on “unburied bodies” and “cannibalism, victim’s remains” referred to by Ehmann and Farocki in 2007.
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 238.