Struggle for Skouries

Juxtaposing images of the production sites of the pharmaceutical-chemical industry with speculations on the historical, social, and material conditions of Cyanotype photography, Blueness probes into the (gendered) politics of materiality and the (violent) historicities of its form.

The film follows a figure that proceeds through the stages of exposing and developing a Cyanotype. They revisit factories in Seveso, Italy and Basel, Switzerland that both relate directly to the history of the synthetic dye “Prussian Blue”. In the latent period, when the images are exposed but not yet developed, the figure searches to define their body as both commodity and consumer of pharmaceutical products. This body is modelled on the productive body of Fordist labor. Yet like the industrial sites that appear as remnants of an older mode of production, this body has been fundamentally reconfigured to conform to post-industrial working conditions. Subsequently, the figure aims to perform against pharmaceutical substances and prepare for a neoliberal take-over of their movements, lingering between the roles of researcher, scientist, athlete, pharmacist, patient, woman.

Written and Directed by Kerstin Schroedinger
Cinematography: Andreas Voß, Andrea Thal, Oliver Husain
Editing: Kerstin Schroedinger
Music: Wibke Tiarks
Sound Design: Manuela Schininà
Producer: Kerstin Schroedinger

Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist working in performance-based moving image and sound performance. Her historiographic practice questions the means of image production, historical linearities, and ideological certainties of representation. She researches the coinciding histories of industrialization and film. Her works and curatorial practice are often collaborative. Since 2017 she is a member of LaborBerlin, an artist-run analog film lab in Berlin.