Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani: Selected Films

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday, June 24 at 5pm for a screening of notable works by artist duo Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, featuring Sayonara Hashima (2009), Freedom of Movement (2018), and Appropriation Takes You on a Weird Ride (2020), followed by an in-person conversation with the artists.

From the haunting remnants of Sayonara Hashima, an exploration of the abandoned coal mining island of Hashima in Japan, to the vibrant energy of Freedom of Movement, which investigates the dynamics of migration and urban space, to the journey through cultural collision in Appropriation Takes You on a Weird Ride, the works of Fischer and el Sani invite viewers to examine the intersection of past, present, and future, negotiating themes of memory, space, and the intricacies of human experience.

The screening is made possible with the support of Villa Aurora, Los Angeles.

Films

Sayonara Hashima (2009, 17 minutes)
Sayonara Hashima takes as its subject Hashima, an island off the coast of Japan with a fascinating history. Entirely manmade, the concrete island served as a coal-mining operation that, at its peak of operation, housed some 5000 inhabitants, at the time the most densely populated place on earth. Abandoned in 1974, when its mineral resources had been exhausted, the island has since taken on a ghostly, mythic status in the national imagination, aided by its appearance in Battle Royale II (2003), a Japanese adventure/science-fiction film. Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani explore the changing roles of the island throughout its history, capturing the accounts not only of former inhabitants but also the current impressions of high-school students of a place they know only indirectly through representations. As with many of Fischer and el Sani’s previous projects, Sayonara Hashima asks how memory operates, and how a site wears its history, both physically and metaphorically.

Freedom of Movement (2018, 29 minutes)
Evoking the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome, in which the Ethiopian athlete Abebe Bikila conquered the African continent’s first gold medal, running barefoot and becoming a sporting legend and a symbol of an Africa that was freeing itself of colonialism, Fischer and el Sani recontextualise a new race involving refugees and immigrants staking a claim to their “freedom of movement” amidst Rome’s controversial rationalist architecture. Fischer and el Sani examine the complexity of the ideological, political, and architectural implications of Bikila‘s 1960s Olympic gold medal run, and how they reverberate today.

Appropriation Takes You on a Weird Ride (2020, 20 minutes)
Appropriation Takes You on a Weird Ride investigates the strange German enthusiasm for Native Americans in relation to contemporary racism and its deep colonial roots. This fascination, especially with regard to the construction of a german identity, has a rather frightening than impressive chronology: It begins with the first-century Germanic Cherusci chieftan Arminius and stretches to the adventure novels of Karl May and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows in the 1800s, through the ethnographic exhibitions (Völkerschauen) in zoos and circuses and the founding of “Indian clubs” at the turn of the twentieth century, onward to the appropriation of Indigenous identities by Nazi ideologists, up until the present day, when new right-wing groups have developed an unsettling identification with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility                  
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.       
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.                
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.