The Julian Rosefeldt method?
Set a topic and research texts, make collages, remove them from contexts and condense them for today.
Then find images and places for the moments when the texts speak.
As with the latest film installation "Euphoria" at the Zollverein in Essen.
Their central narrative was shot in Kyiv shortly before the outbreak of war to save money, in the 1870 Central Station and on a military site, columns of tanks shot from a drone perspective.
Other scenes of a dystopian North America that were still missing were moved to Sofia or Babelsberg.
Six months later, part of the Ukrainian team fled to Berlin, and Russia is using economic weapons to provoke a global crisis.
Rosefeldt could not foresee all of this in the project that had been planned for years,
For example, during the excursion into the world of the New York homeless, in which one can almost hear the pendulum swinging between the positions: responsibility versus freedom, altruism versus self-interest, renunciation versus growth, more state, less state.
“The problem with greed is that it has no saturation point.
Because carrying it out cannot fill the inner emptiness, the boredom, the loneliness and the depression that it is supposed to conquer,” says one of the homeless people to his four fellow sufferers.
It's winter, the only thing that helps against the cold is a small fire and a hard liquor.
"The world works thanks to individuals who pursue their own interests, who want to get better," he gets the answer.
A furor of Shakespearean proportions
The longer the dialogue between the two opponents lasts, the more invisible ghosts gather around the fire, above all the American writer Ayn Rand, who in her novel "Atlas Shrugged" sang a song of praise for individualism and considered capitalism not only efficient, but also for moral.
Or the economist Milton Friedman, who prioritized individual freedom over state intervention.
Just two of many text suppliers that you come across in this absurd constellation.
The dry exchange of blows incites the actors to a fury of Shakespearean proportions, you follow them spellbound, hypnotized by the life-shattered faces, from whose mouths a very lively seminar in economic theory can be heard.
And yet, one thinks, there could also be a drama at any moment, the voices are so irreconcilable, the staging and the dimensions of the darkened Hall 5 are so cinematic and so are the dimensions of the darkened Hall 5, in which parallel projections vie for attention for two hours.
The polyphony of the stories, separated from each other by aerial photos of New York, is not only noticeable in the exuberant juxtaposition of fragments by Sophocles, Tacitus, Warren Buffett, Brecht, Steinbeck, Haraway and Snoop Dogg, but also in the accompanying musical elements.