Greg de Cuir Jr., who guest-curated General Relativity, Take Two for e-flux Film, posed a set of questions to the five artist duos participating in the program—Maria Iorio and Raphael Cuomo, OJOBOCA (Anja Dornieden and Juan David Gonzalez Monroy), doplgenger (Isidora Ilic and Bosko Prostran), Claudrena Harold and Kevin Jerome Everson, and Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige—to reflect on the relationship between their shared life and collaborative practice. What follows is a compilation of their responses, lightly edited for clarity and length.
As de Cuir Jr. writes: “We do not often have opportunities to experience artist duos in dialogue with each other. The artist duo is a fascinating, hybrid body. Each of these bodies is a discrete compound organism, yet they are related in the ways they engage with each other and the materials they choose to work on. This text is an opportunity to stage an encounter across distances both aesthetic and geographical, but also an invitation to discover commonalities in ways of moving in and acting upon the constantly fluctuating ecosystems of film and art. Our aim was to let their thoughts and words bounce off of each other in unpredictable fashion, to deeply understand what they perhaps take for granted about themselves as they operate, and of course to celebrate their voices beyond the visual sublimity of the works that they create.”
Dedicated to Lili Hinstin (1977–2026).
Greg de Cuir Jr.: What inspired you to come together as a duo, and what did you learn from your first experience of working together as a team?
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige: We met in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil Wars. We had the same doubts and questions, a certain relationship to the world, to the situation. It became a life project, born of a certain necessity, one that fully and entirely committed us.
As artists and filmmakers living together, it seemed logical, almost natural, to collaborate, to share. From a very young age, we had this determination to live and work together. It felt like an obvious decision. We studied together (though neither art nor cinema), read the same books, and so on. We are very close, aligned in our thinking and our aesthetic. And yet, we are extremely different. Our first artistic experience fully revealed our differences and made clear that we cannot make concessions to one another without creating frustrations that could destroy our relationship.
Sometimes we have intense arguments until we find a solution that works for both of us. For real and intense collaboration, there must be neither sacrifice nor surrender, but also no ego.
OJOBOCA (Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy): It would be nice to say it was inspiration, but it was more a combination of convenience and necessity. When we moved to Berlin from New York, we had to figure out how to make films in a new place. In New York, we knew where to get film, we had a lab we used, and we had friends who were working with analog film. In Berlin, we had a few references, but no real sense of how to go about it. Someone pointed us in the direction of LaborBerlin, an artist-run film lab that had moved a year earlier into Stattbad Wedding, a neighborhood swimming pool that was no longer in use. We had never heard of such a thing as an artist-run lab, but it sounded interesting. So we went to LaborBerlin, which at that time was a makeshift space set up inside of the old changing rooms. The group held a monthly meeting one could attend, and we signed up right after our visit. As a test, we decided to try to make a short film together to see if we could manage to make a film in Berlin on 16mm with optical sound. So that is what we did, and that is how the film Awe Shocks (2011) came about.
From that first experience we learned that we could work together and that we could get something finished, and somehow be quicker than when we worked alone. We learned it is better to collaborate than compete, especially if you are attempting to live and make work together.
doplgenger (Isidora Ilić and Boško Prostran): Our film self-education began at one of the oldest Yugoslav amateur cine clubs. That process was marked by collective work and experimentation. It led us to continue practicing with experimental and underground films, now as a duo. On one hand, it was a continuation of the principles of collective work we had been practicing in the cine club and also in contemporary theater, but on the other hand, it presented itself as a challenge—we were entering a system of art that hardly wanted to acknowledge collective work.
Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo: What brought us together was certainly a shared sense of urgency, the conviction that art can be transformative and offer possibilities for intervention. We both studied art and had independent practices before we started working together. We had always been interested in cinema, initially as a cultural object situated in specific contexts and histories: films can be prisms through which it becomes possible to investigate specific issues and contradictions related to the economies of cinema, its symbolic systems and codes, its aesthetic and political implications. In parallel to hegemonic productions, we have always been interested in researching amateur, experimental, counter-cultural film practices that have developed outside the industry—“minor cinemas.”
As we started to experiment with filmic form, we faced new exigencies and different production logics. We began to work in spaces that were not confined, like a studio, but open to other social relations and forces in the world at large. All of this encouraged us to cooperate. In this new configuration, we had to learn how our respective positions could become complementary, to become attuned, to question ourselves anew, to unlearn what we had taken for granted, and to find ways to develop shared visions. But our cooperation was never inward-looking. From the outset, we worked together with other artists, and these collaborations extended to people from other fields: researchers, musicians, performers, etc. We like to think that a driving force of our artistic practice is the potential for new encounters and commonalities. Togetherness, complicity, friendship, and, ultimately, generosity have always been the conditions that have made our work possible.
Claudrena Harold and Kevin Jerome Everson: Looking back over the long arc of our collaborative journey, April 2006 stands out as a defining moment. That month, our students organized a three-day demonstration against University of Virginia administrators, demanding a living wage for the institution’s lowest-paid employees. When the protesters occupied Madison Hall—the home of the president and provost’s offices—we camped out at the protest site for the duration of the sit-in. In those rare moments when we weren’t reassuring worried parents, strategizing with students, or negotiating with administrators, we bonded over our shared love of sports, music, and family. Sometimes, even in the midst of all that tension, we found room to laugh. By the time the protest ended, with seventeen students arrested, we had forged a genuine friendship.
Fast forward six years, and we were collaborating on our first film together, Sugarcoated Arsenic (2014), an experimental work exploring Black intellectual life and Black sociality at the University of Virginia. The whole strategy was to not center the ruling class. The ruling elite wants to see itself, no matter what the situation or whether they are presented as either bad or good. But in Sugarcoated Arsenic, it was mostly about capturing the sense of community. The process was magical. As artists, we learned to engage the archive with care. As historians, we learned to trust the power of form. And once it was done, there was no turning back—we knew we had to create another film, to continue learning and pushing our practice.
de Cuir Jr.: What is your division of labor, from research to production to the exhibition of your work?
Hadjithomas and Joreige: We don’t have a distinct division of roles as such, but we are not interchangeable. Each of us has their own obsessions, rhythms, worlds, universe, yet we don’t occupy fixed or predetermined places or positions. We reject fixed identities and definitions. This gives rise to experiences and forms of negotiation and composition between different modes of existence. All boundaries become blurrier or more unsettled, even the ones between our life and our work.
Each of us sets out on a new project independently of the other, but the other is always drawn in through a strange feeling of encountering their own political and artistic urgency in the work of the other.
OJOBOCA: We do not really have a strict division of labor. We are both constantly on the lookout for things that catch our attention. It could be an image, an object, a sound, or a text. Then we talk about it, and if it seems to warrant further inquiry, we go along with it. We have to agree, and that tends to happen quickly. Then we slowly figure out what shape it will have, whether it will be a film, a text, a sound piece, a performance, or an installation. After that each of us works on it depending on time and availability. We both have jobs, thankfully not full-time, so we have to find the time to do certain parts. Depending on the project those parts vary. But nothing goes out until both of us have checked and approved it.
doplgenger: The culture industry, both in film and in the visual arts, implies a Fordist division of labor, but in the end it always emphasizes the individual principle of authorship. This tendency is clearly embodied in the pillars of the capitalist machine—possession and fragmentation—which establish positions of power and control. With a much more artisanal way of working, we move against these practices. Our division of labor is not Fordist; we both participate in all aspects of creation. This approach requires a lot of time and the production takes longer, but it is important for us to equally go through all the stages of producing a new work together.
Iorio and Cuomo: Our collaboration developed as a reaction to the idea of division of labor, with its strict segmentation of the working process, its specializations, and its implicit hierarchies. Instead, we have cultivated continuity, logics involving series of back-and-forths, exchanges, relays, reprises. We experienced that a renewed, revived energy flows as we take over from each other and come back with new inputs and contributions, à tour de rôle. We share in the processes of research, writing and editing. Shooting situations involve slightly more stable positions, but we sometimes swap positions on purpose. We have therefore never established a division of labor based on a fixed partition. It is more a question of affinities, obsessions, or strengths that vary through different moments and phases of the working process.
Harold and Everson: Our labor is evenly divided, but colleagues often summarize it simply: “Claudrena conducts the research, and Kevin covers the aesthetics and formal decisions.” In reality, it’s more nuanced. Scouting the location, securing costumes and props, and recruiting talent is a collective endeavor.
Scriptwriting and research generally fall under Claudrena’s purview, while Kevin handles cinematography and editing. On set, the actors work closely with Claudrena, while the crew operates under Kevin’s guidance. During editing we collaborate, with Kevin managing more technical aspects. But we are always in conversation with each other.
de Cuir Jr.: How would you describe the ethics or politics that you practice in sharing authorship?
Hadjithomas and Joreige: From the very beginning, the question of ego was set aside in favor of curiosity, sharing, and encounter. Accidents are central to our practice. This relationship between the two of us has shaped an entire way of working and collaborating with others, where it is necessary to adopt different tools, shift our perspective, and embrace accidents, fragilities, and serendipity. We put in common everything without really trying to see who is at the origin of the idea. We don’t care at all. We don’t like power, and the notion of authorship doesn’t preoccupy us very much. We think it kills an artist to be too attentive to that. We are more interested in creating a common world, a common project, something about the common.
OJOBOCA: We are less and less interested in authorship when it comes to what we make and the experience we are after. Since most of our work is based on found material of some sort, we like to think of the works more as commentaries or footnotes.
In a more general sense, most of the interesting encounters and discoveries that have happened to us in the process of making things have been accidents. If you do not get in the way too much, it can feel as if the works make themselves. That is usually the best. So we try more and more not to force ourselves onto the projects. Years later we look at the result and ask ourselves where it came from. The projects acquire a kind of foreignness, a kind of strangeness that can be pleasing because they no longer belong to you. Something similar happens with children.
doplgenger: We believe that our collectivist approach to labor in art is a political act that tries to diminish the status quo and destabilize the system of knowledge, opening new horizons and the possibility of emancipation. We didn’t want to sign our names individually, and we chose a name for our duo deliberately. “doplgenger” is the Serbian transcription for “doppelgänger,” a German word which is the literary term for the common phenomenon of the double. It literally means “double-goer.” A doppelgänger is a stranger, a foreigner, an outsider, a social deviant, and someone defined as evil precisely because of their difference and their capacity to disturb the familiar and the known. It defines space outside of the dominant value system. It is in this way that the double traces the unsaid and unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, made “absent.”
Iorio and Cuomo: Shared authorship has always been for us a response, a refusal, perhaps even a provocation in the face of certain expectations arising from the art world, where individual gestures and “genius” are so often mythologized and transformed into commodities so that they become profitable for the art market. A practice that involves a collaborative, collective dimension functions differently than a solitary one. This does not mean that there are no moments of solitude, intuitions, or singular visions, but what becomes very essential and exciting is to bring these subjective contributions into discussion at the heart of the working process. This involves vulnerabilities and requires learning to listen and take care. It also sometimes involves disagreements and conflicts that must be overcome in order to reach a common position. But it is a way for us to slowly shape and strengthen the arguments of the work, to put them to the test. Sharing and exchange, equality and reciprocity, effectively shape our cooperation process. Perhaps the ethical and political dimensions of our work are already there, at the heart of praxis. We like to think that these modalities, and the increased strength to think and act together, are part of a politics of love.
Harold and Everson: We are one. Each of us has our own strengths, yet we deeply value our partnership. We recognize the singularity of our collective voice and the necessity of collaboration. Division and credit, equally distributed. That’s understood from the jump.
de Cuir Jr.: What do you see in each other as artists, and what are your complementary qualities?
Hadjithomas and Joreige: It is a complex question. Since we seek to refuse assignments, definitions, and fixed positions, one might invoke Montaigne’s phrase, “because it was him, because it was me,” to answer it. But we would add to it all the other possibilities and variations of identity, thought, the unknown, the unexpected, and the joy of discovering them.
OJOBOCA: We have similar taste in terms of what we wish to keep and what to remove. We also trust each other, so that when one of us says that something does not work we generally accept it and let it go, and vice versa. We also have discipline for the process, often for different parts of the process, so that things one of us might not want or like to do at a certain time, the other will. In general, what works for us is that we are both fine with waiting for something to resolve itself, which might take a long time. That goes back to trust, knowing that one of us will resolve the impasse without either person having to carry the full responsibility.
doplgenger: Dedication reflected in speed, words complemented by images, history that begins with memory, criticism that draws from inspiration and a momentary flash, tireless collecting that helps sustain an unfounded idea… everything that stands on opposite sides and changes itself in the encounter.
Iorio and Cuomo: In fact, we met long before we began working together, and we certainly already shared similar commitments, particularly on anti-racist and anti-colonial issues, outrage at the violence and disastrous policies that are leading the world to destruction, and the conviction that art can help to offer other imaginaries, languages, and perhaps even alternatives. We have common artistic sensibilities and the same ethics which guide our interactions and relationships, but we also have very diverse interests that nourish our work. We have always believed that we must affirm our differences, even if this sometimes involves tense moments and vibrant debates. Complementarity becomes effective through the multiple back-and-forths involving exchanges, discussions, negotiations that characterize our working process.
We have always approached the different parts of our films as relatively autonomous elements. The tension between the visual and the sound components, which we have often attempted to amplify in our films, perhaps reflects our respective interests. Filmic form offers the possibility for those interests to meet and articulate themselves. The writing process is a complementary movement between the two of us, which is also enriched by our respective parallel readings. The writing of our films is done in versions, often based on pre-existing, collected, or recorded material. It is not a matter of scripting in advance, but rather of developing the script during the different phases of the work. The writing continues and is finalized during the editing phase, which is also a phase of joint work. As we face difficulties that often arise in the development of projects, and sometimes the momentary feeling of personal discouragement, it is valuable to feel that mutual support will preserve enough tenacity and determination to go on.
Harold and Everson: We both understand and respect multiple genres, and we are committed to the work. We are also dedicated teachers who see the pedagogical value of what we do.
de Cuir Jr.: If you can only choose one work or project that best encapsulates your interests and aesthetics, what would it be and why?
Hadjithomas and Joreige: It is impossible, and we totally refuse to make that kind of choice. Each project is related to the previous one. It’s like a journey with no clear path, and ours is full of ruptures and upheavals that have shaped us much more than anything else.
OJOBOCA: The work of ours that most people have seen is probably Wolkenschatten (2014), because somebody uploaded it to YouTube. That film would be a good primer for many of the ideas that were bouncing around at the beginning of our collaboration. But it really belongs to a certain time in our work, and it is hard to say that it encapsulates how we think now. It is the same with our other works as well. They belong to a time and a space, and it is hard to bring them into the present as representations of who we are or what we are thinking about now.
Forced to choose, perhaps the one that still feels like it creates an experience that is still surprising to us is The Masked Monkeys (2016). That one still feels strange to us in the sense that when we watch it, even though we are aware of the individual parts and how they were put together, it feels like it opens up a space of experience that is beyond our control.
doplgenger: There are two, actually. The project Mirage (2006–2008) was very important at the beginning of our joint practice. It included post-dramatic theater, film, multimedia performance, and happenings, and thematically dealt with cultural and political stereotypes and media manipulation by challenging the audience to question the ways of perception. Through this project we tried to explore our early interests—modes of reception of representations in the society of spectacles. This broad field of social and artistic research simultaneously freed us creatively and warned us of future obstacles to collective creation, both among ourselves and in relation to other people.
The second project is Fragments Untitled (2011–ongoing). Conceptually, we designed it to be created through time and to never be completed. It deals with “viewing” the media images of the 1990s during the breakup of Yugoslavia as our collective trauma that calls to us and to which we keep returning. Time and time again, both historically and geographically, this place of trauma turns out to transcend the experience of one generation. That is why it is a platform of direct communication with the contemporary moment.
Iorio and Cuomo: It is difficult to single out a film. Our projects arise from specific moments and contexts, or attempt to respond to them, and certain aesthetic decisions stem from these premises. In this selection, Appunti del passaggio (2014–16) is probably the film that marked a turning point in the development of our work. Previously, we had produced a series of works that focused on contemporary mobilities and the emergence of a new border regime in the Mediterranean area. While the contemporary situation is also present in Appunti del passaggio, that film takes a more historical and biographical approach. It traces the trajectories of people on the move between southern Italy and Switzerland as the ’60s became the ’70s, revisiting villages in southern Italy deserted by their inhabitants, the border zone in the Alps, and the facilities of the former “Grenzsanität”—a modernist building used as an immigrant health inspection station until the mid-1990s—in Brig, Switzerland. The film is based on a series of notes and transcripts of conversations with acquaintances, friends, and relatives who were subjected to intrusive medical checks imposed at the border on foreign workers and subsequently experienced harsh working conditions, widespread discrimination, and xenophobia. Their words unfold a narrative that sheds new light on the period of the “economic miracle.” The film concentrates on the semantic dimension but also emphasizes a more imperceptible vocal quality: Maria’s voice not only delivers words previously gathered in an intimate context, but reactivates them through a new performance. At the same time, due to her strange Italian and her accent, the voice makes a theme of her position. She is the depositary of these words and memories shared by a previous generation, which are known to her for biographical reasons. She passes on these words and memories beyond the inner spaces where they have remained confined, like elements of an unknown, denied history that remains to be written.
In this work and those that followed, listening has become a significant modality and feature. We know that this act also has political ramifications, particularly in feminist thinking and practices which see listening as an active act, an act of reciprocity. In Undead Voices (2019–21), which responds to Isabella Bruno’s Donne emergete! (1975), listening—“listening to a film”—was the specific approach that guided our work. Instead of giving precedence to the visual, we concentrated on the intact soundtrack of this film, which was considered destroyed beyond repair according to archival criteria. Listening to a polyphony of voices and languages is also an important part of 2 (2024–ongoing), which revisits how “sanitary risks” became a strategy for controlling immigration, this time using rare archives and medical documents that we had not been able to examine previously. The reconstruction of fragments of overlooked histories related to a class of the “unwanted” has remained an important preoccupation in our work. The multilingual soundtrack emphasizes the transnational implications of these processes and policies that legitimized borders and their violence, calling for new alliances in the present.
Harold and Everson: How Can I Ever Be Late (2017). The film reconstructs Sly and the Family Stone’s 1973 visit to Charlottesville, Virginia. Drawing from a rich archive of oral and photographic accounts of the concert, it centers on a small group of Black students tasked with transporting the legendary band from the airport to the concert venue. The film is formally composed and the nighttime lighting is the best. Our assistant director Kahlil Pedizisai really hooked up our lighting and crew.
de Cuir Jr.: Complete this sentence: To be an artist duo means…
Harold and Everson: Always coming up with new and better ways of completing works.
doplgenger: Constantly sharing ideas and concepts, which are debated and negotiated and which must go through phases of self-examination, doubt, and articulation in order to ultimately reach an agreement, while developing and growing ourselves throughout this entire journey.
OJOBOCA: Collaboration, compromise, camaraderie. It is the solace of knowing there is someone beside you to share the work, with all its highs and lows.
Hadjithomas and Joreige: Harder work, greater demands, but also deeper and more intense joys. The other never ceases to surprise us.
Iorio and Cuomo: Learning to listen, to differ, to unlearn—to nurture the irresistible force of thinking and acting together.
