Romana Schmalisch: Mobile Cinema

About

She will begin with a performance lecture, presenting a montage of images and film extracts on her long term project The Choreography of Labour using her Mobile Cinema as a presentation apparatus. In The Choreography of Labour, a project developed at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Romana Schmalisch examines different historical and contemporary strategies of efficiency and education that are centred around the body. On the one hand, the project critically examined choreographer Rudolf Laban’s techniques to improve workers’ efficiency for production and on the other, it investigated the different programs that job centres in Paris use in order to make unemployed young people, or those with limited working capability, fit for the demands of the labour market.

For this lecture performance at NN, Schmalisch revisits Mobile Cinema, a project where the idea of a travelling popular cinema was explored. The form for the Mobile Cinema was derived from Alexander Medvedkin’s film The New Moscow (1938). In this film, an engineer presents his designs and visions for Moscow on this structure as the real space of the city is represented by cinematographic means.

Schmalisch constructed the Mobile Cinema and used the apparatus to present a montage of images and film extracts on different subjects to the audiences at the diverse performance venues, and complemented it by reading text contributions by invited guests. Over the years, the programme constantly changed; materials and filmic notes collected or produced on the journeys found their way back into the Mobile Cinema programme, sometimes also leaving it and becoming independent films in their own right.

At NN the Mobile Cinema serves as a mediating device to talk about the relationships between labour and art. Over the period of the exhibition different film extracts and archive material around the relation of dance and labour will be shown.

To date, the Mobile Cinema has travelled to 31 locations including Zurich, Moscow, Rome, Bucharest, Kaliningrad, Vilnius, Kaunas, Warsaw, Berlin Muzychi, Kiev, London, Paris and Yerevan.