person:oliver ressler

Installations, videos and projects in public space by Oliver Ressler » Emergency Turned Upside-Down
▻http://www.ressler.at/emergency_turned_upside_down

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his film was shaped by the “summer of migration” of 2015, when the Schengen system was suspended for several weeks and wealthy European states temporarily opened borders for refugees from Syria and the wider war-zone world. But it soon became obvious that the “welcome culture” of a few European states would not last long. Some EU states responded to the movement of refugees by reinstating borders; all joined in an abject contest to look like the least desirable destination.

“Emergency Turned Upside-Down” confronts the cynical and inhuman discourse that calls refugees’ presence in Europe “emergency” when that word should be applied to the war, terror and economic strangulation that forced people to move. This latest migration wave is the emigrants’ rational response to the wars waged in Asia (“Middle East” and beyond) and Africa by western powers willing to prop up or shoot down local proxies – kill “Arab Springs” or command them – as opportunist interest dictates.

#cartographie #europe #réfugiés #migrations #frontières #murs

Installations, videos and projects in public space by Oliver Ressler » There are no Syrian refugees in Turkey
▻http://www.ressler.at/there_are_no_syrian

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Refugees attempting to enter the European Union play a specific role in the relation between the EU and Turkey. The same European powers that routinely invoke “human rights” to justify military action in Africa and Asia (including the “Middle East”) deny all protection to survivors fleeing the slaughter they order. The EU border regime is responsible for tens of thousands of drownings in the Mediterranean, while Turkey has opened its borders to nearly three million refugees, more than all EU states combined.

The film channels voices that not only go unheard but are quite unheard-of in the western “refugee debate” – because if Europe is the center of the world, speakers like these couldn’t possibly exist. They are Syrian refugees who preferred not to seek a way into the EU, choosing to continue their lives in Istanbul instead.

Exposition : Political Imaginaries: Making the World Anew by Oliver Ressler

▻http://www.wyspa.art.pl/title,pid,44,oid,38,cid,432,lang,2.html

How, if at all, can we start over? How can the world be imagined as a better, fair, equally accessible location? Imagination is the long-forgotten word in mainstream political thinking.

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Wyspa Institute of Art is pleased to announce the first Alternativa 2014 exhibition, Political Imaginaries: Making the World Anew by Oliver Ressler, opening on April 29 at 7 p.m. The artist, who is based in Vienna and with whom Wyspa bonded with its inaugural show Health and Safety in 2004, is the key artist shaping our thinking upon matters of alternative forms of organisation of social, economic and environmental life. For Wyspa, frequently working with Ressler, he is the artist who, by his stance, engagement and matters of concern, is the recurring point of reference. How we can get organised? What is our relation to power structures? What are the economic links and dependencies? How, if at all, can these conditions be thought anew? Since the mid-1990s, Ressler has travelled around the world to research, work in the field, document and distribute alternatives to the mainstream models of communal organisation and its economies, modes of protest and environmental issues.

#art #olivier_ressler

Fluchthife & Du ?

▻http://www.fluchthilfe.at

Une expo marrante à Vienne, avec Oliver Ressler

Fluchthife & Du?

Herzlich willkommen auf der Homepage von Fluchthilfe & Du!

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Dank Deiner Spende können wir unsere bereits veraltete Seite am
Montag, 17. Februar 2014 im neuen Design relaunchen.

URGENT ALTERNATIVES: UTOPIAN MOMENTS

7 Banners

A chapter of Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom
Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler

Between February and September 2014, a series of 7 large-scale banners will be presented on the façade of the Secession. They will relate to the uprisings, occupations, and social movements that have emerged in recent years. Utopian thinking has revived with a sense of urgency lately. It is the idea that things can carry on as they are which is real wishful thinking.

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The first banner to be installed, Fluchthilfe & Du?, addresses the critique of the EU border regime and its migration policies expressed by the self-organized refugee protest movement in Vienna. The design of the banner, titled Fluchthilfe & Du? (Escape Aid & You?), echoes a current campaign by the Caritas, which collects donations with an appeal to charity while distancing itself from those it denounces as “human smugglers”: people whose assistance to refugees made it possible for them to come to Austria and apply for asylum in the first place. Fluchthilfe & Du envisions aid to refugees as a service and publicly solicits support for their struggle for freedom of movement.

The work was created as an act of solidarity with those activists of the refugee movement who have been held in custody since July 2013 and accused of being members of an international human smuggling organization. The charges—they supposedly made millions and endangered the lives of refugees in transit—have been rebutted, but the Austrian interior ministry continues to criminalize them.

February 20, 2014, 7pm

Official campaign kickoff of the charity organisation Fluchthilfe & Du
For further information please visit www.fluchthilfe.at

In March 2014 the British collective Wealth of Negations will design a banner. In April 2014 artist Halil Altindere will focus on utopian moments in the struggles around Gezi-Park in Istanbul. This series will then directly evolve into a second series of banners created by a group of international artist-curators, including Ayreen Anastas / Rene Gabri*, Zanny Begg, Mariam Ghani, Miguel A. López, Pedro G. Romero/Archivo F.X., Christoph Schäfer and Bert Theis. They will produce one banner each between September and November 2014 in relation to their 1-week long research exhibitions in the Secession.

The banners will be displayed as an integral part of Utopian Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom, a research project by Ines Doujak and Oliver Ressler, which is funded by the Austrian Science Funds FWF (AR 183-G21).

* These artists reject the term “curator” for their practice.

Installations, videos and projects in public space by Oliver Ressler » In the Red

▻http://www.ressler.at/in_the_red

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In the Red is a film about the Strike Debt group, an offshoot organization of Occupy Wall Street in New York City. The group organizes around debts, an instrument of control and maintenance of economic power. Strike Debt initiates several activities to expose hidden mechanisms of financial capitalism. Similar to Occupy, the movement organizes along affinity groups: The theory group issues a handbook—the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual—for those attempting to renounce their debt. The action group organizes protests, provides free medical care and information about their activities. The Rolling Jubilee group buys, for very little money, the huge amounts of personal debt the banks have already written off; they then “abolish” the debts and therefore free the debtors from their bills. By this grandiose act, Strike Debt spreads information about how the secondary debt market is working. Few people in the U.S. know that when individuals consistently fail to pay bills from credit cards, loans, or medical insurance, their bank or lender usually sells that debt to a third party. These sales occur for a fraction of the debt’s true value—typically for five cents on the dollar—and debt-buying companies then attempt to recoup the debt from the individual debtor and thus make a profit.

#vidéo #documentaire #installation_artistique

Installations, videos and projects in public space by Oliver Ressler

Je profite d’un message d’Olivier pour vous présenter son remarquable travail : résistance, géographie, territoire, espace... l’artiste autrichien Olivier Ressler, joue et se joue de tout

►http://www.ressler.at/category/projects

1. Take The Square A 3-channel video installation, 2012

►http://www.ressler.at/take_the_square

The emergence of the movements of the squares and the Occupy movement in 2011 can be seen as a reaction by people who opposed and began to fight the massive increase in social inequality and the dismantling of democracy in times of global financial and economic crisis. The movements of the squares are non-hierarchical and reject representation; direct democracy shapes their activities. The occupation of public places serves as a catalyst to develop demonstrations, general strikes, meetings and working groups on different focal points. Successful site occupancies in one place often inspire occupations in other cities, without a linear relationship.

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2. After the Crisis is Before the Crisis

►http://www.wyspa.art.pl/title,OliverResslerSpatialOccupations,pid,44,oid,38,cid,381,type,4.html

Oliver Ressler will present a new body of work that addresses the starting points and implications of the global financial and economic crisis as well as the underlying flaws in the model of parliamentary democracy revealed by the crisis. Ressler’s films and installations are often based on interview situations in which the artist creates a platform for the concerns of his protagonists. Exemplary is the 8-channel video installation /What is Democracy/ (2009), which was shown at Wyspa Institute of Art in 2010, in which by means of interviews with activists he essentially formulates a global analysis of the deep political crisis facing the western model of democracy. This crisis is manifested in the fact that elections in parliamentary democracies increasingly become rituals devoid of meaning, while the real decisions are made outside of public debates. Ressler’s wall text /Elections are a Con/ (2011) alerts us to this danger, while the wall text /Too Big to Fail/ (2011) and the films /The Bull Laid Bear/ (2012, co-directed with Zanny Begg) and /Robbery/ (2012) explore the handling of the financial and economic crisis, the bailout of banks and its social consequences.

3. Cartographies of Hope: Change Narratives

►http://www.dox.cz/en/exhibitions/cartographies-of-hope-change-narratives

“It’s not the story of the battle; it’s the battle of the story!”
Patrick Reinsborough

In the last few years we have witnessed how the corrosion of the three main modes of social imaginary that defined modernity – the market economy, the public sphere, and the self-government of citizens – has reached a critical point. As a result, the increasing number of people in different fields, social scientists, artists, public intellectuals, and activists are calling for rethinking and reinventing social change. Such voices, however, are too often fragmented in their respective boundaries, and, consequently, they have not yet been able to articulate a compelling alternative metanarrative that the public would identify with and which would thus result in a major positive change.

4. Occupy Everything

►http://www.grazmuseum.at

Die mit der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise verstärkt einhergehende Umverteilung von unten nach oben brachte 2011 neue Protestbewegungen hervor: den „Arabischen Frühling“, die Platzbesetzungsbewegungen in Spanien und Griechenland, und die von den USA ausgehende Occupy-Bewegung. Obwohl diese Bewegungen nicht direkt miteinander in Verbindung stehen, haben sie doch einiges gemeinsam: Es sind regional agierende, nicht-hierarchische Bewegungen, die Repräsentation ablehnen und Entscheidungen auf direkt-demokratische Weise fällen. Der Besetzung von zentralen öffentlichen Plätzen kommt die Rolle eines Katalysators für die Formulierung und Herausbildung politischer Projekte und Arbeitsgruppen durch die Beteiligten zu. Erfolgreiche Platzbesetzungen an einem Ort inspirieren dabei oftmals zu Besetzungen in anderen Städten.

#art #géographie #résistance #cartographie-radicale

Superbe action et réflexion sur l’utilisation de l’espace

Installationen, Videos und Projekte im öffentlichen Raum von Oliver Ressler » Resist to Exist

►http://www.ressler.at/de/resist_to_exist

Resist to Exist

A project in public space in Copenhagen
by Oliver Ressler

The project Resist to Exist consists of two elements, which are presented next to each other within sight of the S-train station Bispebjerg in Copenhagen.

The first element of the intervention is a freestanding billboard of 366 x 244 cm that shows a photographic image with fenced-in containers of the shipping and oil conglomerate Maersk—the largest Danish corporation and the world’s largest container-shipping corporation. Containers are the most important means of transportation for goods around the globe and therefore essential for the continuation of capitalist world-market. Major parts of the fence on the image are destroyed, as if they were taken down in an uprising.

This billboard is accompanied by 12 meters of fence placed on the lawn next to the billboard. It appears to be pieces from the extracted fence on the billboard. Concrete panels are beneath the fence, so that it is slightly above the ground. This metal structure can be used as a grill for a huge barbecue freely available to the public. The fence, which previously formed a barrier between a transnational corporation and the public, has been transformed into a “commons”—into something joyful, practical and meaningful where people can meet. It creates an image for the dispossession of the “republic of property” through the “multitude of the poor” that emerges “at the center of the project for revolutionary transformation” (1).

According to the social theorist David Harvey, the main achievement of neo-liberalization has been to redistribute, rather than generate, wealth and income. In this “accumulation by dispossession”, existing wealth is extracted by transnational corporations from areas all around the world, usually from the poor or the public sector, through legal or illegal means, and most often in situations where the limits of legality are unclear. (2) The billboard imagines the reclaiming of this previously expropriated wealth, the attempt of the people to win it back.

The project Resist to Exist is a re-appropriation of activities that protagonists of social movements such as the Piqueteros, practiced in the uprising during the crisis in Argentina in 2001. For them, destroying fences and re-using them as tools to prepare a meal, became an act of survival. In order to exist, boundaries between what appeared to be immovable were dismantled.

The project in Copenhagen takes place in an old railroad area, which residents from 2002 to 2007 tried to transform into a park (with barbecue areas) and cultural facilities according to their needs. The municipal officials finally forced out the residents. The project is also within view of the Føtex shopping center, one of many subsidiaries of Maersk.
Resist to Exist pursues the question whether an activist practice—which was performed in a specific historical situation—can gain a new relevance in this current situation, where not a single state, but the capitalist system as a whole is in crisis.

The project will open with a free barbecue for everyone at 3:00 pm on July 30 and remain in place until August 21, 2011. During this period, it is open to everyone to use for meetings and barbecues at any time.

The project was done during a residency at ANA – Astrid Noack’s Atelier (www.astrid-noack.dk) in Copenhagen in July 2011, supported by Statens Kunstråd, Nørrebro Lokaludvalg and BM:UKK.

Credits: Kirsten Dufour (ANA, YNKB), Katrine Skovgaard (ANA), Biba Fibiger, Andreas Lykke Jensen, John Jordan, Bjørn O., Katarzyna Winiecka.

(1) Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt: Commonwealth, Cambridge, 2009, p. 55
(2) Ibid., p. 230 – 231