How can a landscape speak?
It’s like wondering whether the grass, the crickets,
or the pond are only a backdrop to the events,
or whether they actually participate in them,
with their shadows, depths, sounds,
waiting to become narrators?
A. Vujanović

Landscapes of Resistance, a film by Marta Popivoda, traces a journey through the memories of antifascist fighter Sonja (97), one of the first Partisan women in Yugoslavia, who was also among the leaders of the Resistance movement at Auschwitz. As Sonja speaks, we travel through the landscapes of her revolutionary youth as they exist in the present time – the Serbian forests and mountains where the partisans gathered and the muddy grounds and countless chimneys of Auschwitz – towards her tiny Belgrade flat where she lives with her husband and cat. Since Sonja is a great storyteller, capable of telling about past events without hindsight, she takes us directly into that peculiar atmosphere and mindset, which gave birth to antifascist resistance. We make her story travel through time towards the bodies of the new generation of antifascists, bespeaking that it is always possible to think and practice resistance.

If it is indeed true that Aracoeli returns to topics fundamental to all of Morante’s texts and questions them in an often disturbing manner, our hypothesis is that the novel cannot be reduced to a deep expression of despair, but, rather, succeeds in confronting crucial philosophical and epistemological questions in an original and profound way: through its narrative inquiry into the relationship between mother and child, Morante’s text creates a ‘hallucinatory’ representation of the original mother-child dyad, questioning the classical distinction between subject and object and offering a theory for the genesis of language and meaning.

The protagonist’s journey to Spain in search of his dead mother forms the poetic and theoretical nucleus for the novel’s manifold perspectives and motifs that contaminate and disrupt literary, psycho-analytic and political paradigms as well as categories of identity, gender and sexuality. In particular, the novel’s intricate structure allows different levels to interact with one another, producing asymmetries and contrasts that represent a form of resistance towards the hegemonic and totalizing claims of the logos.

On the occasion of the death of the philosopher Jacques Derrida in 2004 U.S.-American comedian and performance artist Janice Perry performed Derrida, alone in her apartment in Frankfurt for three days, imitating his movements and gestures, in an attempt to embody some of his theories of deconstruction.
Documentation of this performance led to an edited video montage of the documentary film ‘Derrida’, shown simultaneously with an original video and supplemented by an artist talk/live performance.