Palermo oder Wolfsburg[CHINA] - Rough Cut Screening
Followed by a conversation with the artists and Benny Shaffer
Beginning in 2012, Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho began working on a video project, which takes as its starting point the 1979 experimental melodrama Palermo oder Wolfsburg, directed by the German filmmaker Werner Schroeter. That film traces the story of an impoverished young Sicilian man who, after migrating to Germany, finds employment and a new life at the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, until a thwarted romance with a young German woman leads him to murder two German men. Lien and Camacho appropriated this film as a psychologically-loaded lens through which to investigate the themes of transnational movement, labor, trade, and cultural difference into the present day, suggesting also how artist bodies are moved and circulated by these broader economic forces.
This rough cut includes footage shot in Palermo, Wolfsburg, Manila, Singapore, and recently Yiwu and Beijing, and is edited to a looped audio sequence from the original film. The screening will be followed by an open discussion with the film maker and media anthropologist, Benny Shaffer, who also collaborated with the artists on a recent research and filming expedition to Yiwu.
Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho are residency artists in 2016 Artists-Residency-Program organized by the Department of Culture and Education of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany (Shanghai) and am Art Space.
