Fischer & el Sani: Berlin based multi-media Artists

Spelling Dystopia 2008/9, exhibition view, Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig 
HD,16:9, 2 channel video installation, colour, stereo,17:25 min

With their work Fischer & el Sani focus on transitory spaces and vacuum situations in urban environments, collective memory and vision in various media such as film, video, installation and photography. They critically reflect the rise and fall of modernity, the intense and uncanny relationship between our contemporary society and utopian projects that have driven the evolution of our history, from the past to the future, or the anachronistic merging of both ends. Their work is a permanent pursuit of and negotiation with the transition of time.

Nina Fischer / Maroan el Sani have been working together in Berlin since 1993. From 2007 until 2010 they have been working as Associate Professors for Film and Media Art at Sapporo City University, Japan. They have been the recipient of the Karl-Hofer-Prize of the University of the Arts, Berlin and were awarded several artist in residence stipends e.g. at German Academy Villa Massimo, Rome, DAAD in Tokyo, Cité des Arts in Paris and at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Artist website: www.fischerelsani.net  Gallery contact: http://www.eigen-art.com/

INTERVIEW

AC: How do you use Film as a medium to discuss notions of architecture and the memories held within a certain building?
N & M: History manifests itself in the diversity of architecture from different epochs. A building is a visible remnant and a piece of memory of a certain time. Our work is a permanent pursuit of and negotiation with the transition of time, or the transition of epochs. We explore the historic traces of urban landmarks, monuments and events that embody such a transition. As with many of our previous projects, we ask with our new film project Spelling Dystopia how memory operates, how a site wears its history, both physically and metaphorically.

We are interested how cinema has an impact on locations. It changes the perception of a place and causes a shift in collective memory.With Spelling Dystopia we focus on the public perception of the uninhabited island Hashima near Nagasaki, which has a vivid history. In the year 2000 it became the film location of a science fiction blockbuster Battle Royale, and came back into the Japanese consciousness, with a different connotation. The younger generation started to know the place mostly from movies, mangas and video games, as an abandoned ghost island.

Spelling Dystopia, 
(production still)

Through these images the island appears almost as a fantasy, an imaginary playground where various images and layers of reality and fiction already got in a state on mingling. 

Aided by its appearance in Battle Royale the island has since taken on a ghostly, mythic status in the national imagination, a fictionalized shift in collective memory.



Spelling Dystopia
(production still) 



Memory changes with the media that is produced at these places. By producing a new artwork about a place like Hashima island, we are not only bringing memory back to the contemporary stream of media consumption, but also influence how it will be remembered in the future. By the format of a film installation, that uses several screens, we try to create a new approach for the way to watch it.  The viewer can switch between parallel time and story streams, depending on his own knowledge, associations and imagination, and finally add this new image to his own memory.

Spelling Dystopia / Iwa:Rock
Colour print, Diasec, 70 x 115 cm, 2009



Spelling Dystopia 
exhibition view, Kunsthaus Glarus 2009 


AC: What do you see is the potential for Film + Architecture as an expanded field of Architectural activities?

N & M: In Film, Architecture often tries to look real, and is obviously fake, but the other way round, cities also start building fake architecture. We saw a lot in Asia. It is like Disneyland in the city, and has the effect, that, if you have a visitor from Japan for example, strolling together through Berlin or Leipzig, they always ask you: Is this building real? And most of the time, you are pretty sure about the "realness", but some of them have been reconstructed after the war, or after the wall came down, and sometimes, architects might have cheated a bit, or a lot, building it "after old plans" like for Hotel Adlon or some of the historical buildings that have been "reconstructed with modern techniques and elements...."

AC: You discuss "the complex relationship between the visual language of a building, its psychological effects and the political-economic reality in which it functions" in relation to your piece "The Rise" ?  How could the link between architectural space and film space inform the critical revision of spatial thinking and spatial intelligence? 

 N & M: Yes for The Rise, it is about the relationship between buildings and their psychological effect. We refer to Anthony Vidler "Über das Unbehagen in der modernen Architektur". There are many films also that are based on this effect, like Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and also recent films that play in the modern environment of empty office cities by night. The house, which usually should be shelter, often becomes a frightening place, like a prison.



The Rise,
HD / 35 mm, 16:9,17 min.,loop,colour,Dolby Digital, 2007

 When we prepared The Rise, we had a look at the etchings of Piranesi, where he shows the endless stairs, that never bring you up to the top, and stories like the "Baobab" from Luis Borges, where a chameleon like shadow follows everyone, who climbs up the stairs of a tower, and it always falls back to the bottom, when they arrive on top. This was a Malaysian tale.

With our film work The Rise we show the uncanny, the unforeseen, which lurks directly under the glossy surface of the modern environment. This fear is also visible in the new architecture itself. It is a global, universal phenomena. The security has risen a lot since 9/11, and has a direct influence on the city development and design of public space in contemporary architecture. That has also an effect on the users of the spaces. 



The Rise

(film still)



AC: How can knowledge of filmic space be used to rethink the way in which architecture deals with spatial sequence and spatial narrative in cities?

N & M: The knowledge can be used in different ways. When I think of architecture in films, it is often shown in a way to criticize the situation, like in the Truman Show, where the guy lives in this gated community like place, which also imprisons him, and on the top, it is all fake, people act in loops and it takes him years to find out about it, because it is so close to what really happens in our society everyday. I think architects should consider architecture in films more often as warnings!

Of course there is also the opposite position. Architectural design in films has often inspired. When we think of early James Bond movies, with the film sets and futuristic houses like in Moonraker build by Ken Adam, that we saw in our childhood, this has certainly had an effect on contemporary architecture. 

If you think of spatial sequence and spatial narratives in cities, there are other elements coming into play too, like history, memory, and environment, even "actors".
Fischer & el Sani are currently showing a new exhibition in Rome, "Empire of the Signs" .

Refer to gallery website for more info: http://www.galleriamlf.com/ 

* All images sourced from http://www.fischerelsani.net/ 

Many thanks to the artists Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani for participating in this research.