Complicity

«Complicity» is an ongoing long term project in performative cinema. We understand «performative cinema» as an ongoing exchange of images, thoughts and other stuff, that sediments in differently updated forms of cinematic productions. In that way we try to performatively undermine the representative logic of cinematic production: the film IS the process. What you see is a practical endeavor in media philosophy: «Aboutness» is over. Vollhardt and deLire do and think («in» and «through») media. This is our way to engage gender queerness and transgenderism performatively, rather than putting another genderqueer/ transgendered body into a frame ready for consumption by an implicitly normative, distanced, unincorporated spectator who experiences herself in opposition/relation to the visual representation of gender given in so many «queer» films. The queerness, we believe, is in the machine, in the process, in the immersed spectator. «Representation» left and we don’t expect her back any time soon. Consequently every presentation of the material is destined to rot away while new branches grow and work with and against each other – a film like a coral (credit for the coral goes to art historian Judith Sieber).

Lene Vollhardt