Wednesday, 31 January 2024, 7 pm, diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery
Film screening and conversation with
Alexei Evstratov | Silvan Hillmann | Ina Karkani | Cyril Schäublin
In Saint-Imier around 1877, a different time seems possible: in the early days of industrial watchmaking, ruptures across social fields and milieus create parallel temporalities, each with its own timetable, values and ideologies, and no single dominant structural frame of reality has been set (yet). In a proto-Taylorist society, where dignitaries and their gendarmes seek to control the most exact time and dictate the rhythms of production and community, a group of workers form an anarchist union in association with the First International federation of workers’ groups. This is where Josephine, a worker in charge of assembling the unrest wheel (the “heart” that animates the mechanical watch), meets the cartographer Pyotr Kropotkin, who has come to the Jura valleys to draw local and vernacular maps against the abstraction of a top-down ordering of space. Both demand the liberation of time and space and counter the values of the international marketplace as well as of nationalism with solidarity and pacifism.
Unrueh/Unrest is a film about time and place, about who and what constitutes realities, and about the ways in which our forms of experience relate to work, leisure, and the larger processes that shape history. In this sense, the film addresses many of the topics engaged by diffrakt’s counter | infrastructures reading group, most notably the critique of existing infrastructures and their implications (in the broadest sense) as well as how to build alternatives. After the screening, these and other political and aesthetic questions will be further pursued in a conversation with the cameraman Silvan Hillmann, the film scholar Ina Karkani, and the director and screenwriter Cyril Schäublin.
The film will be screened in the original languages with English subtitles.
Additionally, on 1 February 2024, between (roughly) 11 am and 4 pm, we will host a workshop to deepen and extend the discussions around several questions raised by the film. If you’d like to participate in the workshop and receive the materials beforehand, please send a short note to mail@diffrakt.space.
The event is organised by Moritz Gansen and Hannah Wallenfels in collaboration with Michela Coletta, Freie Universität Berlin, and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions.
