The investigations of the London-based Forensic Architecture collective are always based on two premises: First, state violence leaves traces. Second, decision makers have the power to erase these traces. Their reconstruction of the NSU’s murder of Halit Yozgat was one of the most spectacular works of documenta 14 and nominated for the Turner Prize. The method of their counter investigations: digital modelling, audio analysis, timeline comparisons. Their goal: synthesizing an incident in a precisely defined space-time continuum. Here: What happened on 6 April 2006 within a time span of 9 minutes and 26 seconds in a room of 77 square metres?

Ralph Eue

A straightforward dispute. It started in 1990 with a reading of the writer Jürgen Fuchs from memory records of his detention in a Stasi prison. A listener stood up and said: “I’m one of the people you describe. But nobody talks to us.” Tamara Trampe and Johann Feindt subjected themselves to the experience of letting him, the other, talk: conversations in front of the camera, shortly after reunification, with a lecturer in “Operative Psychology” at the university of the Ministry for State Security. He was interested in people, had wished for more “humane” methods of interrogation, he says. Beyond that not a word of regret.

Ralph Eue

Lyndon B. Johnson, also known as L.B.J., politician of the Democratic Party of the United States of America, Vice President under John F. Kennedy and his successor after the latter was assassinated. L.B.J. was also responsible for the first deployment of American troops to Vietnam in 1965. A film about Lyndon B. Johnson then? No doubt, but rather indirectly. Directly, Santiago Álvarez’s film seems like a pop pamphlet about assassination as the ultima ratio of U.S. politics in the 1960s. And suddenly L.B.J. reads quite differently, with L like (Martin) Luther (King), B like Bobby (Kennedy) and J like John (F. Kennedy).

Ralph Eue

The artist Mario Pfeifer, the Leipziger Volkszeitung stated after a screening of “Again” in the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, had preserved a humanistic optimism that still believed in the possibility of dialogue where others had long resigned themselves. An incident in the Saxony town of Arnsdorf is re-enacted in an elaborate mix of codes from truth-finding media formats (morning show re-enactment, court show etcetera): In the summer of 2016, residents tied up an asylum seeker with cable ties because they thought he was violent.

Ralph Eue

A group of young people in Halle-Neustadt moving aimlessly between the concrete blocks once built as a socialist model housing estate. Familiar certainties dissolved along with the GDR. Even though there were hardly any foreigners in Saxony-Anhalt, a dull aversion to everything that hadn’t been part of daily life until then began to spread. The general dissolution, perceived as a threat, is countered by apparently clear world views. When Thomas Heise won the “Documentary Film Prize 1992” at the Duisburger Filmwoche, the laudation ended with the assumption that the film would probably provoke disagreement. It turned out to be true.

Ralph Eue