Zustand und Gelände (Status and Terrain)
Of overwriting places and inscribing political culture of memory: the starting point for Ute Adamczewski’s documentary is the early concentration camps of the Nazi regime. Images of streets, homes and castles show places that, from 1933 onwards, became part of a network-like fascist infrastructure and later contested spaces for historical interpretive sovereignty and political legitimisation. After the film, the director will talk with the historian and Antisemitism researcher Wolfgang Benz.
Accompanying programme to the POWER SPACE VIOLENCE. Planning and Building under National Socialism exhibition
Ute Adamczewski works as a video artist and filmmaker in Berlin. Her video installations have been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Shanghai Art Biennale and at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. Her most recent works Neue Ordnung (2013) and La Ville Radieuse Chinoise (2015) were co-produced by the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Zustand und Gelände (2019) is her first documentary film.
Wolfgang Benz is a historian. Until 2011 he was professor and director of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the TU Berlin. He is editor and co-editor of several book series and journals, a member of PEN and currently, among other things, spokesman for the scientific advisory board of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. He has published widely on 20th-century German history, National Socialism, anti-Semitism, and research on prejudice. His most recent publication was Allein gegen Hitler. The Life and Deed of Johann Georg Elser (2023).
Angelika Königseder is a historian and research and project coordinator of the Arthur Langerman Archive for the Study of Visual Anti-Semitism at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the TU Berlin. 1996-2010 and since 2020 research associate at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, 2011-2019 freelance historian and exhibition curator. She has published numerous publications on the National Socialist camp system, justice and publishing under National Socialism, and Jewish postwar history.