HOTEL KUMMER

Hotel Sorrow (German original title: Hotel Kummer) is an artistic approach and reflection on global trafficking of women. The experimental documentary film is based on police material filmed in brothels in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Congruently, footage from environments in Lodz, Poland, create an inbetween of places that narrate the labour with the female body. Places that show what forced prostitution was and is – they are absent and present at the same time. The film turns places into protagonists and narrators of this (hi)story of migration between Argentina and Poland, so that a narrative of the past as well as of the presence can be told. The search for traces in Buenos Aires and Lodz documents those places of remembrance.

Hotel Sorrow was supported by the Hessen Film Fund, the Commissioner of the Federal Government for Culture and Media (BKM) and Stiftung Zurückgeben.

Selected Screenings: C.A.R. Contemporary Art Ruhr Fair, Essen (DE) * Hanoi DocLab (VIE) | Screening and Artist Talk * Open Screening | International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (DE) * Ji.hlava Academy | Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (CZ)* Metamorphoses LAB, Goethe-Institut Ukraine

Roseola

Stenciled and transferred to photo sensitive paper that is not completely fixated – the medium of the photogram manifests the disappearance and invisibility of the trafficked women. Roseola was developed alongside the research for the video Hotel Sorrow. The work appears like a carpet or a flat floor sculpture. You have to get close to the photograms, which are covered with glass, going around them in order to conceive the motives properly. Different female torsos become visible. The images derive from one of the first film footage shot in Argentina: an advisory film about syphilis.