Otjesd / Leaving Video installation by Clemens von Wedemeyer

As part of the exhibition The Leipzig Phenomenon

In “otjesd” Clemens von Wedemeyer has recreated situations of waiting in front the German Consulate in Moscow in a peripheral quarter in Berlin with Russian migrants. This production was preceded by observations and film research at the visa application offices in Berlin and Moscow. The dialogues and the scenarios – people waiting, others offering economy trips, the staff sitting at folding tables outside to help fill out forms, or a large sign – are based on these observations. Transposed into film, these situations glide past like an absurd fairy tale or a dream. The camera work – a single slow pan – and the warm artificial light contribute to this impression. In “otjesd” the artist and film theoretician Clemens von Wedemeyer tests how much fiction is needed to depict realities. Cinematically far removed from the documentary and more in the format of the cinema of illusions, in “ otjesd” Wedemeyer uses fragments of a reality to focus on the surreal experience of border bureaucracy. The film imagines an endless loop, in which the protagonists who want to leave their country appear to be caught. Artist, born 1974, lives and works in Leipzig and Berlin.