Kontrewers

Film created from the Polish Educational Archive materials, telling the story of a matriarchal family through the eyes of a child grappling with the reproduction of ideological and representational systems. Originally created as didactic and propagandist tools in communist Poland, the footage is repurposed as a locus of auto-fictional memories, with their scientific register shifted towards a treatment of images themselves as specimens.

A 3-channel video installation consisting of spaces of worlding that allow for a reconfiguration of the real in a way that escapes commodification. Dismantling seemingly fixed identities, both of the subject and their background, the story weaves around Olga Petrova, an English silent film actress, who pretended to be an Eastern-European countess in order to gain fame in the American film industry of the 1910s. She set up her own film studio, which closed, like many others, when the major studios in Hollywood dominated the industry. The work looks at how copying, especially of the strategies of mass cinematic productions, can become a tool of emancipation and production of difference. Olga’s story is reimagined through a fictionalized tour of her studio, where the viewers are guided by a green screen.