Florian Dedek: Dann muss es ja ein was weiß ich was Gutes geben

On view 1 – 30 March 2017

Then indeed there’s got to be, what do I know, something good is a quote from the conversation Fassbinder has with his mother at the beginning of Germany in Autumn: the momentous essay-film that continues to be associated with the Red Army Faction (RAF) to this day. 38 years later a son once again talks to his mother.

The thirty-minute film is his attempt to establish connections, seek traces, and reconstruct different stories without necessarily aligning them. One of these stories is the history of a radio mast that was blown up in 1986. Another one is the political story of people being illegalized due to state suspicion and collective silence. Also, there is the media history of the RAF. Its aesthetic-political appearance appealed to the arts, which the film traces and enacts in past and present. And last but not least, it is the personal story of Dedek whose parents were sentenced for an attack they never carried out. For ten years, the boy only saw them during visits in prison. Following these different trajectories, the film tells a story that may be a family history. It is a family history, however, that is equally and inevitably part of West Germany’s political, mental, and cultural narrative. Although personal experience may have been its starting point, the film hence exceeds the autobiographical by screening the RAF as an obstinate memory that is ripe with artistic references and mnemonic displacements. (Text: Svea Bräunert)

Florian Andreas Dedek
1984 in Duisburg, lives and works in Leipzig and Cologne, Germany.

Education: Since 2016 postgraduate programme, Academy of Media Arts Cologne; 2015 Diploma with distinction, Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig (Prof. Astrid Klein / Beatrice von Bismarck).

Awards/Grants: 33rd Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival - nominated for the A38-Production-Grant Kassel-Halle. Exhibitions / screenings (selection): 2016 59th International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film; 33rd Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival; European Media Art Festival Osnabrück; 2015 “Leipzig malt”, Wiensowski & Harbord, Berlin.