For the revival, Jennifer Mattes has reworked her film Bars von Atlantis (2020) and chosen filmmaker Michael Gülzow and his work Die ultimative Frage auf alle Antworten (The Ultimate Question to All Answers, 2019) as her dialogue partner. Together they start a chain of elective affinities.

‘Michael and Jennifer met at a pirate party. There and at the Academy of Fine Arts, they began a long-standing friendship and collaboration that continues to this day. Although they have ended up doing very different work, they have always given each other good advice. Michael would give Jennifer a YouTube scene and Jennifer Michael sometimes a title in return. This is also what made Jennifer want to invite Michael: the exciting dialogue between their works and approaches, in some ways connected and yet also different. What the two share is their own kind of humour and the ability to laugh at themselves. And if the world needs anything right now (maybe the film world too), it might be a deeply ambivalent yet smiling look at (more or less) tragic events so that we can endure them better.’ – Jennifer Mattes

Jennifer Mattes
Next Trip (Bars von Atlantis/what leaves the cellar must also leave the story), AT 2021/22, 20 min.

Jennifer Mattes (*1982, Germany) is a video artist and filmmaker. In her video works, archives and images are deconstructed in order to place them in a new context of individual storytelling. The viewer enters a world of fragments that originally formed a whole, but now have new connections and narratives that move in the tension between documentation and fiction. They offer a critical view of real, cinematic and virtual space and their intersections, tracing socio-cultural developments, economic and political conditions and the current production of images, in a curious, often humorous perspective on issues concerning human existence.

jennifermattes.blogspot.com

Michael Gülzow
Die ultimative Frage auf alle Antworten, AT 2019, 8 min.

Born in 1982 in Kiel, Michael Gülzow studied at the Muthesius Academy of Art Kiel and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. A central component of his artistic work is audiovisual storytelling. In his filmic productions, he combines elements of common formats from the entertainment industry with the methods of avant-garde film. He follows conventions and imitates styles, only to break them in the next moment. The goal is to create special moments of irritation and comedy that enable a reflected view of one’s own perception and expectations as well as at the medium itself. Content-related motifs are often the relationship between art and society, neoliberal self-optimisation and the manipulative power of image and sound.

chaelguelzow.com