Hidden curricula, nudging regimes, governmentalities—they are coming to the fore now, accruing obscene visibility in a big stand-off between liberal individualism and uniformizing state rule.

Alongside these ‘necro-visualisations’ of human tragedy, the concept of the model cuts across the public imagination as a harbinger of what might be and what was. By TOM CORBY

Comparing the corona-phenomena to previous epidemic occurrences allows us to gain a grain of understanding and to make sense of the void, of absent bodies. By ANTOINE SIMEAO SCHALK

The ‘great withdrawal’ has made the circulations that make up subject-object relations almost brutally concrete. By LINA HAKIM

The mines are exploited and emptied. There is a lacuna—left as a poisonous gift of modernity. Debris next to a village. Next to my village. By VINIT AGARWAL

Those resistant to the idea of sortition as a substitute for election are often surprised when it is made clear to them that the use of random selection is a standard and reliable practice in many representative democracies. By LUIS FEDUCHI

Window Poster # 1 + Colouring-in Version, May 2020. Poster designed by JAMES SMITH

Calling the hospitals by the person epitomising modern nursing was not a simple misnomer but a poor attempt at dressing up a wolf bred by austerity in the clothes of a sheep versed in historical knowledge. By JELENA STOJKOVIC

Our own cells split the foreign intruder, allowing it to contaminate our body, turning ourselves into our own evil twins. By LANA LIN and H. LAN THAO LAM

It turns out that Seligman had chronicled the psychic wounds of colonialism, revealing a political order fundamentally at odds with Britain’s self-understanding. By MARGARETA KERN

They have recorded the song in Zulu, each vocalist recording in their own home and supplying these voice-messages to be incorporated into this new rendition of the song. By PHILIP MILLER

"Once the bats were trapped, the researchers took blood and saliva samples, as well as fecal swabs."

The emergency measures are rules of composition. By DAVE BEECH

Really: that brachiosaurus-sized crane puts time into perspective, making more tangible the way the world may have looked when it teemed with life at that scale. By SARA BLAYLOCK

Appropriating the simplicity of play, it seems, might come with consequences. By ERAY ÇAYLI

How tired the world has become of this human and its spectre. By YVE LOMAX

The confusion and turbulence of COVID: that is the place we all share now. It’s the first movement of the sonata, grave. By PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN

As a society, in a way unlike any other, the question is out in the open: what does it mean to consider the lives of others? By ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN

Perhaps we do not need a critique of the power-relation in “giving a voice” but of the very demand for a body to produce a recognizable voice in the first place. By ALEXANDRA PIRICI

The non-human futures of the SARS-CoV-2 virus will not be written to be stored in the digital archive. Its trans-species assemblage will have had vectors that are imperceptible to us today. By AMIT S. RAI

I see my dry hands, clean as hell, as never before. And I see fear in a handful of sanitizer. A dispatch from Warsaw. By KASIA BOJARSKA

We would be very interested in getting this stock from you. Please let us know if it is still available.

We, survivors, were born for this crisis. By OREET ASHERY

April 2020 saw gatherings of the American right-wing that declared they demand to “re-open the economy,” as they call it. These protests were payed for by the wealthiest donors to the US Republican party. By JOSHUA SIMON

We may ask, whether in the current, transitional period of social distancing, where intermingling, contact and proximity have become anathema, the notion of entanglement is already accruing a new set of connotations, regardless whether we understand it in a concrete or metaphorical sense. By ERIC C. H. DE BRUYN

"[...] a tsunami of derivative, cliche ads all within a week of one another. It's not a conspiracy - but perhaps a sign that it's time for something new" (Microsoft Sam)

I lift one side of the headphones away from my left ear dispelling the patch of workplace that has been mapped onto the kitchen table for the last hour or so. By JON THOMSON and ALISON CRAIGHEAD

Biocontainment suits, biological hoods, and isolation tents create physical separation, but allow for visual access, between the infected and the hygienic. By SHANNON MATTERN

"In chaos causality is lost, strategy and leadership no longer work as well, and we are left powerless."

A small selection of texts written by the outstanding film critic and translator Frieda Grafe, complemented by a speech from Harun Farocki.

Is the sender genuinely asking me if I am well or safe or healthy? By DANAH ABDULLA

By a pupil at The Meadows Primary School, Lincoln, with RUTH EWAN

The choices of headlines and visual artwork reflect the editorial and national context of each magazine.

He was let down by both governments… By JORDAN McKENZIE

"She is wearing a lab coat and a face mask and is saying, in the softest tone possible, that she is about to take a nasal swab to test for the virus. It’s scary and soothing at the same time."

(...) how and where am i supposed to read the nuances by which I understand the world (...) By TERESA CISNEROS

The background and experience from which the new instructional visuals on the coronavirus crisis are being produced, inform the reduction guided by notions of didactic efficiency.

Media corporations will likely leverage the CoVid-19 crisis to insist that ubiquitous high-bandwidth media constitute an essential service. By LAURA U. MARKS

In the corona triage the temporality of field surgery and the asymmetrical chronopolitics of age cohort, class affiliation and racial predicament meet in a new constellation.

Interaction designer Christian Lässer is able to render evident (and visible) how the topic of the epidemic has gradually taken possession of Die Zeit – up to the full blown monopolization of its editorial content.

It seems to me as if theoretical persuasions are now being confirmed not only in practice, but literally embodied. By JAN DISTELMEYER

Shouldn’t this crisis demand an urgent politics of the domestic, specifically of those who have the privilege to #stayathome?

There is "a good chance that the large-scale experimentation with telepresence, which has long met with much resistance, will encourage its lasting adoption" (André Gunthert).

The Coronacrisis cover artwork of the French daily newspaper Libération, starting with the issue of January 23, continuing without interruption from March 9 to ...

The V-shape recession, a sudden deep trough, followed by a quick surge, for few, and the Germans with their economic strength and infamous intransigence when it comes to economic solidarity most certainly among them, is becoming analogous to the V-ictory-sign (in the wake of the V-irus ...)

It seems as if Suely Rolnik has already in 2005 anticipated the effects of the virus that is currently chokeholding the world: For the already discriminated minorities, including the predominantly black service providers and domestic workers recruited from the favelas, are now considered particularly at risk. By SABETH BUCHMANN

Photos by LUDGER BLANKE        

see German Post

The retreat into "solitary facelessness," however, may have different faces, depending on local histories and urgencies.

If anything could stand-in as a primary culprit in the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus that is circling the globe with seemingly unprecedented speed, it might be the jet plane. By VANESSA SCHWARTZ

Today: Le Petit Journal (February 1911), covering the devastating 1910/1911"pest" in Manchuria

Albeit everyone seems to believe otherwise, every crisis has a history. Hence this crisis has a history as well. BY MARK TERKESSIDIS

Today: a reportage on the cholera in Hamburg in 1892 from the Illustrated London News.

In our compromised and entangled ways, we try to keep going, trying to transmutate heteronomy into shades of autonomy. By SVEN LÜTTICKEN

First delivery: an illustrated reportage on the cholera in Naples in 1884 from the Illustrated London News.

Beneath the current debates and statements about the "costs" of lockdowns and social distancing, beneath Trumpian disengagement from medical cure (in his attempt to decouple the health catastrophe of the pandemic from the "problem" of ecomomic repression and de-growth), there lurks the most vicious vision/version of "therapeutic nihilism."

This weekend's news about 65 Cuban doctors, nurses and technicians arriving in Milan to support the Italian health system's struggle against the coronavirus are a forceful reminder of Fidel Castro's medical internationalism.

Perhaps live streaming should be reduced to the bare minimum: to tutorials around health and medical issues, to tele-meetings of the infected and vulnerable with their loved ones, to non-commercial online courses in the newly decentralized educational systems.

What if the irreversible situation in which the "world community" is now being united, forced to reimagine itself, has entailed a sudden leap in visibility regarding the global accumulation of crises - not primarily as a result of tireless research, political organizing, artistic productions etc., but rather as a correction of the collective sensorium on a gigantic scale?

Among the most unsettling attributes that have quickly gained notoriety (and poignancy) due to the the current crisis' new linguistic conventions  and discursive framings can be counted "from a distance" or "remote".

In the current situation (and any comparable state of emergency caused by an epidemic) much of the existing hope hinges on the statistical and epidemiological sciences that model an event like this by means of computational processing.

A photograph of nurse Elena Pagliarini, fallen asleep, that was taken last week at the end of one of her shift at 6 a.m. in the emergency room of the hospital of Cremona, a particularly badly affected town in Lombardy.

By now, as to be expected from a news situation as engrossing as this one, the compulsion to reach an (or even the image) of the pandemic (if not the world history of pandemics), is tantamount...

Marxist biologist Rob Wallace, founder of Structural One Health [...] renders – vividly and frighentingly – the broader context of the coronavirus crisis...

Pëtr Kropotkin's anarchist-anti-capitalist-commonist-animalist notion of "mutual aid" has been gaining traction for a while already...

An insightful contribution by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos on the socio-ethical dimensions of the crisis...

Among the countless troubling aspects of the Covid-19 crisis is the liberating effect it has on AI-based surveillance technologies and policies...

Angela Mitropoulos' article "Against Quarantine" is an important intervention in the debate around the COVID-19 crisis...

As the Coronavirus crisis is evolving, it becomes harder to tell what kind of image the most publicised image of/on the crisis is exactly...

See German post

The screening is part of the #Forum 50 series of the Berlinale.

A list of previous digitisations from the holdings of the HaFI

Screening of the three-part WDR program on the “Other Cinema” (1969) - with Harun Farocki among others.

see German post.

see German post.

The first presentation of the unfinished film HARD SELLING by Harun Farocki, which was recently found in the HaFI archive.

see German post.

See German post.

The Public Screening is now being continued with a curated program by Stefan Pethke.

see German post.

The booklet is dedicated to the WDR editor Werner Dütsch (1939-2018), who produced numerous films from Harun Farocki.

New publication: Volume 4 of Farocki's Writings.

see German post

see German post.

Premiere of the film and material unearthed in the archive of the Harun Farocki Institute will be shown beforehand.

The current issue 101 on “Navigation Beyond Vision” is now online.

The video documentation is now online.

see German post.

What can archives do for today’s society? How are historical realities translated into contemporary narratives? Can transformation be archived?

Against Cinema, against Culture

Wild's first longer film is set between the fronts of the 1980s revolution in the Philippines (...).

In 1977 Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring embark on a journey through France. They trace the escape route of the German emigration in France 1940/41 (...).

HaFI is one of the participating institutions in Archive Außer Sich since 2017. A complete overview of our activities is now available on a dedicated website.

The meeting focuses on artistic/creative and political/ethical positions within global radical film cultures and video activism movements.

Texts and documents concerning the production context at "Westdeutscher Rundfunk", Cologne

see German post.

Navigation begins where the map ends (...).

The film diverges from traditional ethnographic work and is instead a multi-layered media translation (...).

An experimental essay documentary film on the concept of “Nationality”.

Text excerpts.

irregularly, not haphazardly

Contributions from individuals and communities both inside and outside academia, from artists, activists, filmmakers, researchers, scientists and others are welcome.

See German post.

see German post.

The film portrays the four wives of a marabout in Niger, enclosed in the eponymous courtyard of a building complex. They manage to develop micro-economic strategies to form relationships with the exterior world.

See German post. 

The presentation "Harun Farocki As A Method" revisits films and artworks from Egypt and the context of the Arab world.

A screening with Ali Hussein Al Adawy, the third Harun Farocki residency scholarship holder.

A cooperation event with HaFI.

As history continues, more and more marks are left on the surface of the earth.

see German post.

see German post

Godard stopped traveling to foreign countries, his camera must not even drive around much by car.

From the beginning of September we will be welcoming Ali Hussein Al Adawy as the third fellowship holder of the Harun Farocki Residency in Berlin.

see German post.

The film combines enacted scenes and historical material and is about the past and present of Levantkade in Amsterdam’s old harbor (...)

see German post.

See German post.

A discovery from Farocki’s estate will be shown on this occasion.

A film about the legal process against the ‚Plowshares Eight‘, eight members of the Christian peace movement in US, who hammered a nuclear warhead to pieces at a weapon’s factory.

Jürgen Ebert will present and talk about the last unpublished issue of the magazine, Filmkritik No. 335-336, Nov-Dec 1984, now released on the occasion of "Edit Film Culture!".

With a delay of over 33 years the last unpublished issue of the magazine, Filmkritik No. 335-336, Nov-Dec 1984, will now appear. This edition is dedicated to the filmmaker Emile de Antonio.

see German post.

See German post.

Nightshift explored the work of women in relation to politics, film, desire, and society.

see German post.

A reprint of the yearly indexes from 1975 to 1983, supplemented by the the index for 1984 which was still missing.

see German post.

The titles of Norman's films all hint at the struggle to assert an Afro-American identity in a world shaped by whites.

see German post.

see German post.

The first edition of Rosa Mercedes online journal. An audio journey with Marianna Maruyama through the Farocki Now Academy in Berlin

See German post.

Logik des Gefühls: What happens? Nothing much. […] Where is it set? In an in-between space, between lost love and a coming love. Winter. Berlin. 1981.

See German post.

News from the archive: INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PULL OFF POLICE HELMETS and UNTITLED OR: NIXON COMES TO BERLIN, both made in 1969.

HaFi presents the film PROFESSION: DOCUMENTARIST, followed by a discussion between Shirin Barghnavard and Constanze Ruhm

see German post.

In the framework of the "Farocki Now" Academy, the UdK (University of the Arts) Berlin organises a LARP. Roles are still available upon registration.

For the second Harun Farocki Residency we have invited the Tehran-based Iranian filmmaker and editor Shirin Barghnavard to Berlin for three months.

see German post

A forum for workshops, presentations, and debates which explore the contemporary relevance of Harun Farocki’s work and thought, placing it in new contexts and activating its productive potential

See German post.

Tonight: Opening of the retrospective of Harun Farocki's work for cinema and television at Kino Arsenal.

From “A for Adorno” to “Z for Zidane” – an ABCs of the Essay Film accompanied by a short text Farocki wrote in 1987.

A selection of materials pertaining to the film "Before Yor Eyes - Vietnam" introduced by a commentary penned by the Harun Farocki Institut.

See German post.

See German post.

Political commitment, thirst for research and stamina. A film by Ogawa Productions.

Factories and families as places of exploitation, which don’t just have to be interpreted but also changed.

Documentary filmmaker Gerhard Benedikt Friedl describes Helmut Färber's method of teaching film history.

Helmut Färber’s 80th anniversary was celebrated by some (German language) texts in the media

A mythological road movie, a squatter and hacker story.

See German post.

Kevin B. Lee about Farocki's working paper "What Ought to Be Done".

The talk will include the screening of "Ronny und Harun spielen Theater" which is a short documentary of a staged scene from “Etwas wird sichtbar” (“Before Your Eyes Vietnam”), 1982.

See German post.

Formulating a poetic framework to explore the contemporary landscape of media and terror.

A brilliant (and moving) lesson of how to navigate a post-cinema small screen reality.

Harun Farocki saw the film in 1971 at the Hamburger Filmschau. In the succeeding years, he worked closely with Engström.

Kevin B. Lee will give a „light-typing lecture“ introducing his works and practice.

The blog of the HaFI residency publishes the immediate and informal experiences made by the HaFI residency fellows.

See German post.

See German post.

Kevin B. Lee will be the first guest of the Harun Farocki residency from the middle of December onwards

Architecture, Instructional Technology, and the Social Production of Pedagogical Space Around 1970

Letters exchanged between Harun Farocki, Peter Weiss and Westdeutscher Runfunk (WDR): A glimpse at the production history of "On Display: Peter Weiss".

For the Harun Farocki Institut, Peter Weiss’ 100th birthday on November 8, 2016 meant an opportunity to take a closer look at Farocki’s WDR program “On display: Peter Weiss”.

A guided tour followed by a screening and a talk with Carles Guerra and Bert Rebhandl.

See German post.

We were isolated individuals and simultaneously subsumed into a totality* 


See German post.

‘What is navigation?’ inquires the curatorial seminar 2016/17 of the CCC Research-Based Master Programms / Visual Arts Department of HEAD – Geneva.

Expropriating Television.

The Harun Farocki Institut organizes Farocki Now - A Temporary Academy as a component of the “Harun Farocki Retrospective”.

A working paper by Farocki (1975/76), a commentary by Tom Holert, Doreen Mende and Volker Pantenburg followed by a letter by Peter Nestler.

The Institut's first public appearance at Berlinale 2016. A graffiti by Harun Farocki.

Material to investigate the present, the future past. Impressions from the archive of the Farocki Institut.