Michael Poetschko
Image: still from Our Refrain (Unser Refrain) by Michael Poetschko. Upcoming screening taking place May 5, 2018 at the CCA - Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow.
Introducing Michael Poetschko (b. Austria), a visual artist, experimental filmmaker and independent researcher based in Berlin. Poetschko is one of the artists participating in New Poetics of Labor 2018.
Michael Poetschko explores narratives of living, laboring, travelling, resisting, maintaining and surviving within precarious, urban, and capitalogenic realities, working with experimental forms of filmmaking and installation. He is co-founder of the art and research platform d/v. As a curator and programmer he worked with Harun Farocki (Berlin), Madhusree Dutta (Mumbai), the RAQS Media Collective (New Delhi), Jem Cohen (New York), and the School of Critical Engagement (Copenhagen), among others.
Zona spins a “cinematic-philosophical web” that oscillates between poetry and discourse, where places and times collide and stories leak into one another. Networks of images and meanings suggest the multivalent complexity of the contemporary city and the different forms that life takes there. Taking the form of a cinematic essay, the story follows a photographer and a young philosophy student in their searching movements (“Suchbewegungen”) between the fractures and folds in the space-time fabric of the city - between promises and possibilities, accesses and exclusions, images and words. Within this setting, Poetschko builds stories, places, and characters to map out an “urban contact zone” and explores the precarity and porosity of this space as an immanent part of the city, our bodies and desires. - Austrian Cultural Forum NYC