Harun Farocki: Chus Martínez writing in Mousse: back-and-forth

Chus Martínez writes about Harun Farocki for Mousse Magazine in a new column titled Back and forth, reflecting on the experience of visiting the 2006 exhibition VIDEOGRAMME EINER REVOLUTION at Index.

From the essay:

“It is interesting how, even if I had seen his works before—at documenta X, in 1997, and later at his big survey at MACBA in Barcelona in 2004—Index’s focus on one piece, one event, one argument, opened my eyes in a completely different manner. Farocki understood that images have agency and are capable of creating a tangible dimension of the real. History is therefore nothing we write about but something we see and unsee. Today, this way of thinking is more actual than ever, and Index is presenting VIDEOGRAMME EINER REVOLUTION again, twenty years later.

Farocki’s core ideas resonate daily in my mind: Can contemporary art contribute to creating awareness of the reality emerging from images created inside artificial systems? How can we analyze the impact of those images on our political and social organizations?

Can we still produce images that invent, rather than reinforce, the operational logics of surveillance, automation, and spectacle, using them as marvelous antidotes to the current war and power structures?

I believe it is possible, otherwise Harun Farocki would not have been so passionate.”

Read the full feature at Mousse Magazine.