 Good afternoon. My name is Katrin Röckler. I'm a writer and the vice president of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. I'm pleased to welcome you to this very special event. It's the opening moment of a series which is called The School of Resistance. That's a collaboration platform for debates which was founded by the theater and film director Milo Rau, the founder of IIPM, the International Institute of Political Murder, and the director of the anti-Gent, the city theater in Gent. The School of Resistance was founded as a flexible organization with numerous artists and activists. We are therefore talking today about the question of entanglement of art and politics, about missing institutions and their symbolic founding, about activism and art, and what art can move and is not able to solve. The typical point of break fracture lines. We are sitting here in the building of the Academy of Arts in Berlin at the location Hansi Artenweg. Inside the studio, our institution is celebrating this year, its 325th anniversary. It was founded in the year 1696 by Friedrich I's depression king. The institution has a changing colorful history with fractures, for example, in the time of the 30s and 40s of the 20th century during the Nazi regime. Today, it's a model for democracy of arts, about 450 members are debating and working in it. It's a model for a wide-ranging community of artists. Liberal or left, conservative and anarchistic thoughts come here together. We talk about art, which means also about public space, climate change, social justice. The building we are sitting in was created by Werner Dützmann, a kind of Bauhaus aftermath building. It is a symbol for this open discussion. Why am I talking so long about the Academy of Art? It is an early model. It's known for many questions we will raise today. For example, today, it is specially challenged by the shutdown, the consequences of the pandemic regime, the pandemic. How will art continue? Can, for example, the cinema reopen afterwards? Which forms of art will sustain, will be found? Is there any way an aftermath of the pandemic situation or will we stay in it? Which kind of architecture or public spaces will be places of the art? How can art claim to speak to everyone or to be a connecting element of society? We will raise these questions and many others during the next days together with Milo Rao, members of the Academy and other connected artists. What is a symbolic institution? Can it become real? How is this kind of political fantasy world building? Is it then losing something? Is beauty something which evolves out of dialogic struggle? Not something that can be developed alone? Due to the pandemic situation, we decided to link these debates to film screenings which show the work of the last 15 years. We start with the General Assembly today. Then later, this evening, we will be able to see the last days of the Churchescus. The next days will be shown arrests in Mosul, the Congo Tribunal, the Moscow Trials and the New Gospel. His latest film publication... We will see on Sunday, I think. Documents of an activity, global thinking and acting. In the center, there is a main issue always, world history, revolution and justice handled. My grateful thanks belong to the curators, Martin Waldes Stauber and Kasia Wojtek. The whole team of the IAPM, medical international, Merbe Verlag, European Alternatives, ECCHR, Allianz Kultur Stiftung and whole round theater comments, but also to Björn Madsen and his team that they could arrange everything here at the Hanseatenweg in tough times. In the next 90 minutes, we will follow the path of the General Assembly and start together with a conversation with Milo Rao and Georg Cieslen. And we will watch the march to the Reichstag in German, more impressive, Sturm auf den Reichstag. Therefore, it is an honor to welcome here on stage Milo Rao, the founder of IAPM and director of NTGENT. Okay? He is a mysterious man, staying in different places at the same time. During the preparation of this upcoming event in Berlin, he was also in Geneva, in Genf, where he was rehearsing the Mozart opera, La Clemenza di Dittito, and the opening night was some days ago, I think last... Last Friday, yeah. Last Friday. Three days ago. Three days. Oh, yeah. Four. Very, very fresh. It is always astonishing to hear what you are planning and where you are staying at the same time and what are your arranging and which part of the world. And knowing you for a longer time, I would say that you started your work with reenactments, continued it with preenactments, always with a theatrical sidekick, some more somehow traditional theater work at the Schaubbühne or elsewhere. You published your German books at the Verbrecherverlag, and it's not easy to define what is the main thing, the film, the book, the theater play. How would you yourself describe your work? Is this a question for you? This timeline I just constructed from reenactment to preenactment to a wider spreading media work. Do you see yourself? Is this important for you any more to see this move? Yeah. Thanks for having us here, by the way, in the Academy of the Arts. So it's really a big pleasure to be here. The first idea was to make an exhibition here. Now we have an online film series with guests. And I think when we watch the next days back on 13, 14, 15 years of work we did in different parts of the world and in different mediums, I think what is generally the same from the beginning until now, which is, I think, let's say my general rule of IRPM, I just wrote it down because you mentioned it, beauty can't be developed alone. Yeah. And okay, we can talk about the term of beauty and so on. But for me, the idea of creating what I call utopic collectives, so bringing people together and see when they produce together what will happen. So when, for example, in the last days of the Ciesescus, I saw this tribunal against the Ciesescus in 1989 when I was 12 years old in television at my grandmother's television. And then sometimes later, 10, 20 years later, I went to Romania to work together with activists and artists of Romania to make a reenactment, so a restaging of this tribunal. And then this restaging of the tribunal acted again on the society in Romania because one outcome was a trial against me and my production company because we used the name of Ciesescus because the son of Ciesescus made a brand out of the name of the Ciesescus and I didn't give him money and then even started another history. So I think what is typical for our work is that it's like throwing stones into a lake and then documenting what happens. And of course there can be books or films or series or discussions like here or parliaments or parties or very classical plays or operas. And I think there is a big interaction in between the form we use and what happens during the production process. And I think what we do as an institute and in the end again is somehow documenting what happens while we are trying to achieve an artwork. But normally we only document the process. Yeah, and it's not a difference if you are documenting something which had happened somehow or building something which hasn't happened yet. Yeah, you know. The future is so it's not so far away. I think it's somehow the same. I mean today I had a radio interview in preparation of this series and I was asked but where is the connecting point in between art and politics and I said there is no connecting point because actually it's the same. I think politics or society is just a normalization of an act of art, of an act of creation. When the first parliament was created, the first national parliament, the French parliament during or in the beginning of the French Revolution it was just like some people connecting and saying, okay, that's now we are the nation, we are the parliament and that was people declaring it out of a void, into a void but then what happened and today the French parliament is something that is normalized. And I think that's what we call this, you call it symbolic institutions. So I think you said 1671 or something when Friedrich I created this or the second or whoever, the Academy of the Arts. It was just somebody saying, okay, this is the Academy of the Arts and invite these people and these are the Academy members and then this institution was created and then this institution evolved and will evolve forever. And I think that's how we develop. And of course you can make a photo, you can make a photo now of the Academy or of, I don't know, in theater you always have the date of the premiere and in film you have the date of the release and at that moment you somehow have to be finished but if it would be a year earlier or a year later the product would be completely different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, maybe we continue after this about this because we have a second guest, Georg Seislein, I would like to welcome him here, he's not in the Academy, he is in Kaufbeuren in Bayern, in Bayovaria, sitting far away but very close in terms of our conversation. He's a member of our Academy, he's a writer, author of many books with the topics of art and money, stupidness, controlling regime, right-wing populism, film, film and film. I have to admit I know you as a film critic was the first notion I got from you. You are publishing in numerous publishing houses as the well-known Zurkampferlag, you are also teaching, broadcasting at the public radio and here you will not be the only one time here today but also on Sunday you will moderate another panel, my place here, about the new Gospel on Sunday. Absolutely. And you are at the moment developing together with the Goethe Institute, something very interesting, a platform or a series for poor cinema. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about this. Yes, thank you for inviting me. I think I am taking the lessons Milo taught me in this project, because it has two grounding theories. The one is how it has developed a global factoring of moving pictures. And I think it's in a state that you can't tell something about really independent filmmaking. So we have to reinvent independent filmmaking and we can't do it in the institutions they gave us because there are six or seven big players in the world who control the market of moving pictures. And so we have to find a way to develop a micro-economy of independent films. And for a starting, we try to make cinema pobora, like, you know, Artipobora, with nearly nothing. We use only our smartphones, our handheld computers and maybe some, let's say, some toys, like toy drones or remote control cars and dolls and things like that. So this is to say we make really our movies with our production values, with our production media. And we develop a market for ourselves, or a non-market for ourselves, because we know even if we work on a, let's say, amateurish level, we feed the big players, we feed the so-called online capitalism and we don't like to feed these online capitalism. So what we learned from Milo, it is very important to overcome the rules and the limits of art forms in a technical way and also in a statistical way. So the big aim for this starting, very poor and ending very rich, because we are taking together all the things we have. And for instance, one of our ambitious projects is filming Homea's Odyssey, only with smartphone cameras around the world. A film will develop around the world, starting with 24 chapters of the UDC. And every station is one chapter and then the film moves to the next station, to the next countries, to the next culture, to the next artists. And it develops one time around the world. And if it's finished, it's the new Odyssey only made by production that we have to ourselves. So I hope this will be the biggest game I ever saw. Yeah, and the other problem is that I think after the pandemic crisis, we can't get back to normality, like politicians' promises. So we reopen cinemas, reopen theaters, we reopen galleries and so on. I've made some research for another book project, talking a lot with young artists in every field of art. And a lot of them lost their face in their profession, and they changed their profession. They just stopped being artists because there's no political economy to make a living from. So I think that if we would really go back to normality, it's the same thing in any other field. We have the winners and we have the losers. And I know who the winners are and who the losers are. And so I'm trying to be on the side of the losers. Sorry, are there any winners in the art scene? I can't... Certainly, of course. Yeah, I mean, of course, the big three. Yeah, but artists. Art artists. Yes, every artist who could be branded for the platforms. It's kind of... You know, if you're established, you will be more established after the crisis. And if you are... The bigger the smaller, the smaller. Actually, like in every crisis. Yeah, and so as a critic or as an activist in this field, I feel the duty to be on the loser side. And to find new ways to organize art in our society. Maybe it's also... It's political at the beginning. Like Milo said, there is no difference between politics and art. It's just the two sides of one coin. If I can intervene here. And I think what we have to overcome is the idea of the product. As an artist, you have to use a film. But actually what you produce is a production process. But also you produce a distribution. So what you do as an artist, you have to take over the production process and the distribution process. And I think that's what you're talking about. That you can't think about the product anymore. The product is just a point in the whole timeline of making art or making politics. Yeah, I think this is the product. You get told of everything. Yeah, that you would take over the whole process, the whole institution. You have to make art of the world. And you have to change the society into a work of art. Then maybe you can get a little step to democracy. I like the term you used. It's like throwing a stone in the water and see what's happening. But really see it, not only through the stone and then goodbye. No, we are responsible also for the stones and the waves we made. Yeah, and the lake in itself and the whole lake. And the lake, yeah. And the hand that is throwing, so everything. And of course the stone. And also there is no more difference between critics and artists and series and artists. I think that they have to not only to work together like we did, like discussing and so on. No, I think the process of making art is in itself also the making of theory. Or the formings, the searching for theory. And the other way around, I think every attempt to theorize about this situation has to be considered as a work of art. Yeah, the problem of, I think, the separation of theory and practice, which we have a lot in the art field, where you would have theorists or critics and art makers and they can't even know each other. So this problem to overcome, that's the reason why we don't produce new institutions because they are not thinkable. Because we have only the way of producing works inside the institutions we have. And that's one point perhaps to then step to the next. Yeah, it's a really interesting question because I think the point is not the institution first, but the sustainability of an institution. That it's not art is always somehow a moment. Not a moment, but it's some moments. But it's not a thing of 20 years, 100 years. No, no, no, but let give me an example. For example, we have the institution of city theatres in Germany and they are made out of a special kind of ensembles, of a specially trained artist that can give you a special way of a traditional text and stage them. And that's why they are made for and it's very difficult inside these institutions to change them without changing the institutions and the way they produce. And I think this is what I call critique to construct new institutions or reconstruct the institutions we have to make other products or other ways of producing. That's the point. Because, for example, the School of Resistance, for me, the interesting point is, for example, talking with Georg, who is mainly a critique of the arts and to see his input of talking with somebody from Brazil and to understand they have the same problems as us, perhaps, because in global capitalism, strangely, the problems are quite the same, but they have completely other ways to tackle them. And, for example, the way that the landless movement in Brazil is occupying land, which is possible in the institution of Brazil, I found out it's also possible in the institution of Germany to occupy land if they are not used in a legal way, you know? I didn't know that. And this is the kind of where knowledge and practice comes together. But I'm afraid we should slowly step to the... I think we stepped the film to the... It's a short film about the General Assembly, which was staged, somehow staged, three or four years ago. And we see now a shortcut, somehow, out of the process. Kind of a feature that was made by television of 16 minutes, 17 minutes. Yeah, very short. OK, so... Are we online already? I want to know. Yeah. The world is a perpetual revolution. For the people of Brazil, but also for the people of the country, it's the most important thing. To fight for freedom. This week, Berlin was founded in the Schaub-Vühne, the first meeting of the World Parliament. In three days, 70 candidates were elected and over 15 days passed. The candidates were from over 20 countries. On the General Assembly, there were 8 members of the Bundestag. Lucio Bellentani, the first General Assembly, who is standing next to me, is a head of staff of thousands of Brazilian automobiles and automobiles who work for the German manufacturer VW. Bronsky-Hange speaks for the millions of minors of the East Congo. Only the ten head of the General Assembly, who are gathered here, speak for more people than the whole German Parliament. Long live international fraternity! Long live international solidarity! Long live international fraternity! The history of the nation will retain the date of November 17, 2017 as has been marked by the reptile with a dark passage. This date will also remain in the collective memory as the beginning of the long process of installing the new World Order. We are now on to the storm on the Reichstag. According to the example of the legendary storm at the Winter Palace, the director Nikolai Efrenov was staged in the year 1920. The storm takes place 100 years after the October Revolution and exactly to be 97 years after the re-enactment of Efrenov. We want to ask this picture and say, how today, 100 years later, after all this experience and this totalitarian state in Auschwitz, the world wars, the climate collapse, which is now in the hands of a teacher in capitalism, how can we turn this project, the modernization of the liberation of people, into something else? Not by taking over the power, but by giving it a basic democratic rise in the whole world and saying, we have to democratize these global structures, otherwise we will be lost. And this is the world tree and this is what this picture should stand for. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ceremony and for technical announcement, we start if you all have the time. Yes, I think it is a very big organization to influence the public in Europe, especially in Berlin, for the part of the strong organization. I think it is to make changes in Europe. Please take your seat so that the session begins. Dear colleagues, I welcome you to this constitutive session of the General Assembly, the first world parliament in the history of humankind. I will ask the first speaker of this evening, we are starting the session, Milo Rao. At the moment of the history of humankind, we will talk about climate change, about international diplomacy, about the regulation of world trade, about national sovereignty, about freedom of opinion and if there are limits. The human being is not the crown of creation. The world community really needs such a law. I think as an artist you have to create institutions, symbolic institutions, also utopian institutions, because they don't exist. So the question is rather, why doesn't there actually exist a world parliament? We live in a global economy, why don't there be transnational structures that are democratic? So where you can't say, we invite these people, and it's not always the leaders of the nation who have to do it diplomatically, because they want to block everything that is not 100% in their interest. Who is responsible for the young generation if they don't get their rights? That's wrong, it's really interesting. We feel that there are serious questions that are starting to be addressed. But at least, if I may, the big problem with this philosophy is that I want to follow you well, so that all children come to the world, so everyone must give to the children a certain right at the time of birth. It is the right to depose many of these parents if they are not happy to have received life. I ask the same question to human beings. Why should they actually have no pain? If I think about it, that if there is a pain in the embryo when we give an abortion to a woman, or the fetus, because we have this pain out of it, then I think maybe we should try again. Yes, no problem. It's not a problem, it's just a matter of the situation and the condition. So, there are many academics and professors who are interested in all their knowledge from the people. So, I also want to tell you about the role of the people in the local community. Democracy. I came from a province in Jambi, in Sumatra, but then there was a change when the government was very positive. All of the development of the culture that is not very popular in the local community. This video was published in 2015 which was broadcasted in the village causing many victims, in Jambi by the members of the Pasawid community. The transition scheme was based on the local and local community. And is there a global economy to open a wider market for various products from the people? Thank you. What we are building together the whole world to make that change. I think the rich people will not always be like that. I see there is a lot of hope in the general embassy to destroy everything. Assuming this responsibility, let's go to the official of the voice that establishes the relationship with the Brazilian repressive system of the dictatorship. Thank you very much, Lucio. Your story is very touching and the least we can do is to stand in Saladera to reveal. Thank you very much. The telephone was extracted in the condition of the violation of human rights. If there were women who were raped because they had to have this matter first, we all who had this telephone did not even associate with blood. In the meeting, here I am not directly dealing with direct solutions. It is first a message that passes because I have always been convinced that problems are not known to others. You are less fortunate to have solutions. That there is a democratic deficiency at the global level is a fact. And for us to be able to come through theatrical production or drama to imagine and envisage and play a role of someone who could be a representative at the world level has been really empowering for me. I see that I am fighting for civilization. In 2012, I discovered I was being attacked by the Bahraini regime. And the story was that there is a German company that is selling its software to the Bahraini regime. And here is a woman who takes part in protests in the Bahraini region. And she is a woman who is a woman who is a woman who is a woman who is taking part in protests who is being targeted by this. So the question is why does the German government allow that to happen? Why is this software and technology allowed to be exported? The reality is that very little can be done to help resolve our problems in our communities to get my friends out of prison. But what I do have hope in is German people trying to maintain those democratic values in their own country. This is not a violent revolution. It is a peaceful revolution where people have ideas. They say we want to express ourselves and we want these ideas to be known as current leaders. So the demonstration will be organized on Tuesday. It is not in the objective to attack violence in the parliament, but rather in a way to express the ideas we have. The storm is so far the first distribution of the World Parliament together that we want to create a symbolic picture for these demands. The people are storming the Reichstag and storming the picture and we belong here. It is very important to storm until the Reichstag. Everything came. I thought I was a little hysterical. I thought there were 150 people in November afternoon. I don't know how many people were stormed and stormed. I think energy is added together with friends all over the world in Berlin to create and make changes, the beginning of changes in the world. It would be interesting if it could be done across the continent. It is happening today in Berlin but it would be interesting in Paris, why not in London, in the United States. I think it is an important act that has to be interpreted by the consciousness of the world and that we have to say that we need to make changes. Rebellion is necessary because it is almost too late. At all points we are already at the point of danger. Basically we are in danger. I think it is better not to weapon ourselves to fight for the present but to find a form through this crisis as a human being that we may go 100 years, maybe 150 years, maybe 200 years through this crisis as a human being to go through in a clever way. Then the Georg brings it again. He wants to go into the zoom. We are still on this picture. Okay. These were many impressive pictures we saw. Here we are again. I was wondering you choose to create a General Assembly. Christoph Schlingensieff has founded a party in 2000. Why General Assembly and not a party? In 2010 in my hometown in St. Gallen in Switzerland I created a government of change. There we had a party and we were more in this kind of campaign work and also in the New Gospel we founded the Revolta della Dina which is a kind of campaign to a party, a big movement of 42 NGOs and so on for the rights of the farm workers in South Italy. Here we were interested to create what we called a world parliament. It was a symbolic place where you come together to see you could say let's say the methodology was to ask ourselves what decisions of the German parliament should be discussed in the world parliament and world meaning, time and space. Of all the people touched but also of the people that will be touched later for the unborn or of the animals. So we had members, I'm not sure if it became clear in this little film but we had also parliament members that were standing for the oceans for the bees or for the unborn or for the and so on. So let's say it was something different from a party very important I think always represents a lobby that would lobby for one important aim and here we wanted really to bring together in a kind of universalism all possible voices that are not represented in the German parliament. That was also the reason why we wanted to storm it and why we shouldn't I think compare it with the storming of the Reichsburg like some months ago. They stormed it because they are against democracy and we think that democracy is not big enough. That there are not enough people, not enough voices inside the Reichstag, the German parliament that's why we stormed it. Yeah, okay, let's make it more clear but maybe it was exactly the thing I was seeing when I saw this film the Reichsburger last November and I'm not sure or October last year. Yeah, it was in November. And this is maybe a question for Georg Seislen it seems that many images, public very, very intense images are used at the moment by the very right-wing people and they seem to be more powerful using it. How does it come and what can we do about it? I think that's not a new phenomena. It happened in the 30s in the wake of the German fascism too. And for me seeing this film three times, four times I get to know the difference and maybe in the next step of making pictures we have to make it even more clear that what is the difference. You see the difference in maybe you have to project this film and the documentary of the fascist going and you would see what is the difference. Maybe we have a kind of dialectical montage to do of understanding why right movements conquer democratic and also artistic terms pictures rituals and we will see an illustration of the most famous sentence of Walter Benjamin that the fascists are aestheticizing politics and the left are politicizing aesthetics and you see it in every movement if you look close to it you see it how you cope with space how you cope with togetherness all these things and therefore you can show exactly that the taking over of terms of pictures has failed because the real thing the real democratic maybe revolutionary I prefer as a change gaming energy in symbolic institutions resist this conquering by the right wing movements the only problem the real problem is how both things are represented in the mainstream media so sometimes we make us weaker than we are because we look at ourselves through the eyes of television of mainstream press and so on but I would say that this symbolic institution shows what art can be not only the utopian way of making something as a play that comes for real but also defining a space of freedom you know Jean-Paul Sartre had this I think very beautiful notion he said there has to be a pact of generosity between art and society in his case between the text and the reader and this pact of generosity means that there is in every action both the collective movement and the individual freedom and if you see also the things happened at the capitol in the United States also have certain military to this installation you see that there are not at all any hint of freedom it's just violence for its own sake it's just acting out acting out violence against freedom and so for me as a critic I see how the space is filled and we always know this will not lead to violence because everyone is expressing that it will not lead to violence maybe because it's the huge difference I would see between the both occupations of symbolic forms is that we can see in the General Assembly you can see people arguing debating different sides they are not it's not the one picture they are diverse it was we can follow we can hear listen to some empty abortionist guys also it's a mixture and it's not the far right wing this symbolical we are united in this question the most interesting moment was when the General Assembly was exploding I don't know if you remember at that moment you were there but we had a moment I think it was the Turkish guy from the governmental party who was denying the genocide against Armenians parliament members of the world parliament we decided to throw him out of the hall and later we decided to bring him back and then we found out that it was difficult to decide what are the rules and that we were in the beginning of the process to say what is the methodology of this parliament of a world parliament because of course in the world parliament how would you for example represent oceans who can represent oceans and then you would create parties with lobbies for different ways of representing the oceans and so on but coming back to what Georg said about the same image can look very different and be very different and I think that's really context is everything I think it's true that you can watching at the images of the storming of the Reichstag are these the Reichsbürger or are these the people from the General Assembly but I think if you would show only two images of it to somebody from another culture I think it would be different for some another time it would be difficult to say and that's why context is everything and I think this is for me let's say the only rule of communication if the whole context I'm not even interested to see the end image I just want to know how we came there and from there where did we go, what was happening with everybody in this General Assembly what is the whole history of it I think this is what for me is interesting by doing this kind of installation so this was a film I didn't do myself it's a TV feature and it's very interesting as a documentary but for me there are many of course this kind of films just telling what happened and not why and not knowing more about some, you know something about some characters but not enough you don't know about the whole failure that was in this project about the explosion of the whole in the end I mean we didn't have a charter we wanted to do a charter but it was impossible because we had too many opinions so in the end we didn't come to a charter for a real institution it's a difficulty of a real institution and even if you are kind of short cutting everything by symbolizing it somehow only and by minimizing the problems you could have and also the time you still go into that failure and that's for me the most important and interesting thing when you see how an image breaks completely and I don't mean it in a postmodern way that I always want to see failure and non-professionalism I think we overcame it we have to find some answers but at the same time if we don't let's say find practices that can lead us to answers and forge these practices that can lead us to answers to collective global answers that's what we should do and what we try to do it's very interesting but I'm wondering why are you still so traditional theater work I mean there are many reasons I think one point I'm quite happy in what we are doing and I found a group of people and always new people and old people and we are living together so what should I do these are not politicians if I would live with politicians I would make politics so that's just my milieu and I'm extremely happy on the other hand what we did in south Italy the Congo Tribunal actually it's the first and at that moment only economic world tribunal that is existing and getting more independent from us and from other institutions it's now a real institution not 100% but it's close to and it has a real influence and doing this on a classical political legal way it would take two generations for me art always has revolutionary impulse of just let's do it of occupation of being fast why do two generations such institutions no matter why why don't we have a legal world economic tribunal why don't we have it because they are the nation states everybody is against it and outside the legal institutions outside the political institutions you can create it then more and more include the classical institutions and make it slowly real and that's what I like in this way of kind of anarchistic work that you can do as an artist that you can just say let's do a revolt in south Italy let's occupy houses I don't know let's install the law of humanity and let's do it it's difficult and as I said normally it ends in complete failure and absurdities but you can go many steps very fast that's right and really I have to come back there is such a beauty in this kind of of this energy of solidarity which is the work of theater that I I couldn't do something else okay I was thinking can I add something yeah yeah I think that there are two codes of intervene in reality the one is the political way that has a code a linear code one thing after the other it takes time and every step has a time like Milo said to get generations art and revolution are things that are nonlinear they break the rules of linear time so in practicing art not even practicing art as a product like Milo said but like a process you really change time not only results of time but you change time and this is for me it's the biggest thing art can do because if you change time you change reality not in a like social democratic or green party type let's do this and then and that no let's do all things together in one moment maybe so I think the the best thing in art is you don't know what is happening with what we are doing because it really opens future the future for the politicians for the economists for the bureaucrats is closed it's already written and you as an artist can say no, the future is not written we can change it and even the past is unwritten you know even the past is unwritten you can act on the tradition because there's so many things are forgotten I think that was today when you said what we will discuss about it you said ok perhaps we will discuss also about looking back because when you talk about you topic energy and art and revolution you always think on projection in the future but I think there are so many revolutions to be done concerning the past all destroyed past by capitalism for example I mean I only give one example because we have here on the left we have Kaisara as Antigone when you go to the north of Brazil and you try there to understand for example how sustainability that is existing somehow as a concept in our culture is there a circle of practices that are existing but not known and not generally known and how you can interchange that so that's for me super interesting or when you are I mean last example very short when you look back for example on the revolution of 89 then what is told about what happened 89 in Romania and when you look closely what really happens that the Stalinist elites become pseudo-democratic capitalist elites without any change then reality is very different and then you have to rewrite the past in a very classical way of just putting the facts on their place because they are forgotten but let's think about this revolutionary energy in art there is also the problem because there are two problems the one is the media situation thinking of the chain the production chain of art you need to get this the attention of the media and you can't get hold longer to create a moment of big attention on the one hand and on the other hand you need to if you are doing if something gets going in this revolutionary situation afterwards you have to create somehow the institution the sustainability the ongoing of the political process and these are the media and this question of ongoing they are the fracture points when art sticks to art and there is not a real change but it's only at the end it was only a theatre evening a disappointing moment that's the point I will give you you can intervene in a moment I think this is the older I get the more important for me is to connect these two temporalities that you are describing one temporality where time is exploding and you have to pass the present and the future together in one evening or in one week or in one production and then somehow you land again in reality where the politics are where all the context of the slow processes of change as it is normally and how to bring this together for example how to sustain the energy of this one week of utopia in 10 years and really to change it it's very beautiful to occupy a house but then live in this house is very difficult for many reasons because the people doesn't want to have you in this house for example the houses of dignity that we occupied in Italy of course later we attend to work together with the municipality we had to work together with the church etc it's a long process and that's why and there is all the meaning of school of resistance artists that are professionally in being fast and exploding time and activists that are professionals to landing these machines and to preparing the landing and to bring these two kinds of temporalities together that's what is all is about this actually everything is about this all the criticism I think you might have about art that is political politics that are artificial is about this how to how to create and we talked about distribution we talked about the production process it makes no sense if you make one beautiful film like Georg describes it there has to be a whole you know a whole world platform of distribution and people and every film would only be a stone in it but the first and the last film ever made at the same time and I think this balance is what is political art actually you wanted to add something Georg? I think that critics have to learn this lesson too because they are like fetishists about events they see an event and then they go away and look for the other event and I think for me also as a teacher I wanted to teach my students that you have not to concentrate only on events but on structures and try to be not at the turning points of processes but to be a friend of processes to be a companion of artistic processes go with them try to understand what is developing not what is the product the final product is bullshit even if it may be very beautiful but talking about a final product is in itself I think a capitalist miss so you have to learn as a critic as a theorist also as a journalist you have to learn to accompany these processes this is hard to get into heads which look how can I make some money with my event journalism so I think the question is not if we need media for political purposes but the question is always if I change a political situation I always have at the same time change the media I don't get to change the media I don't change anything so may be grounding this problem is kind of a class track all our media and all our understanding of art is connected I think with middle class our self understanding and is connected with let's say the stability of the system even if it's critical the system needs some critical points of view some interferences and I think as an artist as well as a theorist we have to develop consciousness of the youth the system makes out of art and out of theory and that means really that we can't pause this is the biggest problem of course going back sometimes means getting down calming down okay let's write an individual poem you need it because you get crazy 100% in the activity but you don't have to forget that everything you do in this field is part of more dimensional change and if you forget one of the dimensions you lose the changes you made in the first dimension so if you write a beautiful play without changing theater as an institution the play will do nothing but it will be let's say prayed to the market absolutely we have already some questions from the audience I would first come to this question how we can face the pandemic situation at the moment and I would combine it with a small statement that we face at the moment also a wave of new activism in art so it seems to be somehow connected of the pandemic and it's a new wave we can face it's a very good question we had the general answer in the beginning from Georg when he said the bigger the smaller because the system that is close to fail would get more conservative before the pandemic so what we see is that I am the artistic leader and I am the artistic director and of course it's a big institution and I was from the beginning in very big problems and still is economically because we can tour and so on on the other hand I'm really not going into the big picture but only talking as an artist in another moment we can talk about some play chains we can talk about economics but in the art we are seeing two things one thing is that the fight against authorites made a big step during this pandemic for example for the first time I could distribute what I do in the very moment or in some minutes I can distribute my films for free I mean while we are in cinema if the new gospel we will distribute it for free we are going to go to the Academy of the Arts and in some other platforms on Sunday this would have been absolutely unthinkable a year ago and it's crazy for example the people in Congo can watch the Congo Tribunal before it was just like you can't because there is no distribution system there is no distribution system and so on so these things on the other hand of course you have the virtual economy you have Netflix etc and now you have to see that we are taking over in another way that authorites that are going away from the classical players and not just directly to Amazon and Netflix as an example last question is we are talking here inside the Academy of the Arts in the evening but why are we always meeting in the evening and inside in theater why not outside in the morning I mean all these things there are some answers still in the morning because we say work and then fun and art is fun we could also say first art and work I mean I'm just now a bit thinking about what we are forced to do because we can't do it otherwise when we do it in the right way is it fine today I had a big discussion with my co-workers from a play that we will stream live at the International Theater in Amsterdam and parts of them because they are organized in movements against streaming because the streaming is a big problem for live art they are against it and another part says but it's good to do it so it's really like we have to politicize all these things before they get out of our hands and it's just like this again and Netflix takes it over so I think it's still a moment let's say parts of this new system too late of course but there are still other parts of the system where we can still act but this is the work we have to do now the platforms to I give you one example to end with because this is for me now as Georg said it's not about doing art it's about changing the institutions in which the ways of distributions you would get you would make this art when we had to decide what do we do with this Jesus film we did and then we said we can give it to Netflix or we can create a platform connect this platform to now 100 cinemas and when you go on this platform you buy a ticket, buy a cinema and you support the cinemas but it was very complex that people would understand how you could get this ticket but in the end it paid off and that's the last thing as I'm anyway there holding a monologue now I was always so impressed how simple and fast everything goes even if it seems not planned by the system I mean it's so simple sometimes you have just to insist a bit and then it works out sometimes sometimes I would say Georg Yeah I totally agree I think the artists and the friends have to be more nomadic because the institutions are weak in in defending themselves that is what we witnessed in the pandemic the public spaces that save spaces so called which I would say guaranteed by society by state these safe spaces for art we lost in a certain way we will not be able to get them all back so we are forced outside our also we are forced to go out our comfort zones you know just thrown out of the function of art and critique and theory that we are used to and that's a big chance I think because we are a lot more unsecure also especially for the young artists and the young critics but we feel this freedom this freedom that is not the neoliberal freedom of making your career or making it not but more existential essential freedom and the freedom I think we can use to re-found some ways of distribution some institutions some public spaces with I mean a new energy I think this new energy has to come out of Angel because we can analyze that the art nearly nearly has become a fraction of creative so-called creative economy and this is in my research in my talking with responsibles in big companies this is the real aim of both companies and the so-called online economy to make art part of creative economy and the so-called help the November help from the German government everything bureaucracy that comes with it everything was aimed for two things to make the big companies more capable to buy out the artists to make the artists cheaper you have the right of your own work like in the first place the workers and second the white collar workers now the artists are in the same situation that they are alienated from their own work it's very simple working for the movie industry for the television industry also in the other forms of art you take away the rights from the producers and give the rights to the so-called right owners not you as a producer of art in possession of your work you have to buy it to survive and it's like in the situation of this pandemic crisis a lot of artists had to buy now had to sell their rights had to sell their possibilities just to survive and they had to sell the rights to be controlled institutions that were more or less free before the pandemic crisis now are controlled to the last penny to the last member that is to say that we not only have economic change through the pandemic crisis but also an increasing power of control stately and economically of art and I think this creates and I hope so it creates an angel and it creates an energy for artists to say no we can't go on like this we don't get used to be treated like that and so the this is my personal utopia that the artist that has to be liberate himself or herself gets to liberating the rest of the world I think there's another possibility which is taken very often or chosen very often that you can change the media you are doing so filmmakers starting to write a book or to build different contexts to get hold of your own work in another way that's what you were mentioning about the context building the processing of your artwork then you can gain it back I'm afraid now we have to slowly come to an end we have to come now to an end in six minutes we will have a shift of topic and we will meet the last days of maybe for a short last statement Milo Rau you would like to add to this something otherwise I would start to talk about the situation of literature and about writing people the ones I don't know if you saw it but there was one question by the public I'm not sure if I remember well but it was kind of how do you deal that there are real expectations and there is the art for example when you do a world parliament or do a campaign like answer three minutes no short answer I think it's really all in the balance of the system you have of disruption I mean that way kind of an anarchistic character but what I try is to surround me with people that is activists and again it's art and activism that is working in the long term that knows how to implement that knows what they need and from the beginning on long before the beginning in moment when we are landing somehow in Mosul or south Italy we are for five years network so you can't just arrive and that's what you described about critics critics think that you can land somewhere but you can't land perhaps a journalist can land an army can land but an artist that is doing this kind of art we are doing you can't land at all so you have really to be super well prepared and I think this is this is the point this is actually the point as a writer I would say it's the same it's talking to these people working building up some relations you can't just publish whatever you want to publish because you have to be I don't know you have to make a product that everybody would agree this is also a very interesting point I mean the same when you are kind of talking with people and then they become figures in the play they have to agree to be these figures and that's that's the complex where I would like that really as the third with your activists and you have artists and then you have of course critics that the critics would be more let's say embedded in these processes to find the language to describe it and not this kind of very conservative good and bad language of a product that is visited whenever at a certain moment so I mean even if I'm of course depending from this and then because I am depending of it and every artist as you say from the way of distribution the way of being distributed or not because of criticism and whatever that's why I say let's work closer let's work closer together let's integrate that's the answer but I have to admit we have to close now we will see and we can we are able to watch the movie the last days of the in at 7 p.m. but anyone who is watching it now at the moment on Facebook has to change to the the website of the academy www rdk.de rdk.de and we can watch the movie and afterwards we will meet Il Weitzman the Israeli founder of forensic architecture the historian Sandra Frimmel the director, the film director Andrei Ujika and the academy member Matthias Lilienthal Milo Rau and moderated will be the session by Martin Waldes Stauber thank you very much Georg Seslen in Kaufbeuren thanks to us thank you Milo for talking to us and www rdk.de for the film at 7 p.m. because if not we lose the right to Facebook no Facebook here we want to stay the owners of this film so don't bring it to Facebook that's the point ok thank you