NEPN and Breeze Creatives present a screening of Bläue (Blueness), a film by artist Kerstin Schroedinger on Wednesday 7 March at 6.30pm at Bamburgh House, Newcastle. Following the screening there will be a Q&A with the artist.
Juxtaposing images of the production sites of the pharmaceutical-chemical industry with speculations on the historical, social, and material conditions of Cyanotype photography, Bläue (Blueness) probes into the (gendered) politics of materiality and the (violent) historicities of its form.
The film follows a figure that proceeds through the stages of exposing and developing a Cyanotype. They revisit sites in Seveso, Italy, and Basel, Switzerland that both relate directly to the history of Prussian Blue, a blue synthetic dye.
In the latent period, when the images are exposed but not developed yet, the figure searches to define their body as both commodity and consumer of pharmaceutical products. This body is modelled on the productive body of Fordist labour. Yet like the industrial sites that appear as remnants of an older mode of production, this body has been fundamentally reconfigured to conform to post-industrial working conditions.
Subsequently, the figure aims to perform against pharmaceutical substances and prepare against a neoliberal take-over of their movements, lingering between the roles of researcher, scientist, athlete, pharmacist, patient, woman. (Schroedinger, 2017).
Bläue (Blueness) was supported by and premiered at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2017.
Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist based in Berlin working in film/video, sound and performance. Kerstin’s historiographic practice questions the means of image production, historical continuities and ideological certainties of representation. Schroedinger is a member of feminist film distribution group Cinenova in London. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives New York, Images Festival Toronto, Short Film Festival Oberhausen, International Film Festival Toronto, Gasworks London, and exhibited at MIT List Visual Arts Center Boston, Photo Cairo #6, Les Complices* Zürich, The School of Kyiv – 2nd Kiev Biennale, Kunstpavillion Innsbruck, amongst other places.