Franca Pape, Lea Sprenger, Amelie Vierbuchen: Kassieren

Image: Videostill from Franca Pape, Lea Sprenger, Amelie Vierbuchen, Kassieren, 2023, video, 09:00 Min., color, sound. Courtesy of the artists

Who decides which stories are kept or thrown away? In their documentary film, the three filmmakers Lea Sprenger, Franca Pape and Amelie Vierbuchen set out in search of archive material about the Kalk chemical plant in Cologne. They meet the archivist Dr Christian Hillen, who has a lot to tell. While he struggles with the 16mm film, the filmmakers dig through the chaos of sources and repeatedly capitulate to the resistance of the material. With quick cuts, the film tells of the search, of throwing things away, of gaps and mistakes and of one's own inability, which is repeatedly met with self-irony.

Proposed by Silke Schönfeld in the context of her solo exhibition You Can’t Make This Up at the HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein at the Dortmunder U, Level 3 (12 Oct 2024–02 Feb 2025)

 

Franca Pape, Lea Sprenger, Amelie Vierbuchen

Lea Sprenger studies at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. Prior to that, she completed a degree in philosophy and media studies. In her filmic and installative works she deals with themes of archiving, searching and the digital self. For this she mostly uses a mixture of found footage material, photographs, documents and screen surfaces.

Franca Pape studies media arts in Cologne. Before that, she dropped out of art studies in Münster and completed a master's degree in cultural poetics. She works between theory, text, film and drawing and is interested in collective work.

Amelie Vierbuchen lives and works in Cologne and studies media arts at the KHM. In her approaches she explores border regions of identity, perception, body and form, often in collaboration with microorganisms or starting from events in the microcosm. These explorations lead to oblique connections between pseudo-scientific approaches and queer theory, which find expression in installations and performances, among other things.