Harun Farocki’s film Hard Selling was scheduled to be shown on East German TV one month before its dissolution at the end of 1991. It was, however, never shown and never completed. In the film, Farocki looks at a West German adidas salesman as he looks at the East through car and shop windows. In her re-framing, Rosenfeld looks back at both from an East perspective, some 30 years on. Responding to the film stills, fragments of conversations and announcement texts of Farocki’s film, she mobilizes the figure of the “window” as a frame to submit the conversations and gazes at shop windows, screens and trainers to a poetic-analytical editing. 

 

Elske Rosenfeld, born 1974 in Halle/S.(GDR), works in different media and formats. Her primary focus and material are the histories of state-socialism and its dissidences, and the revolution of 1989/90. Documents and archives are starting points for organising spaces in which these hi/stories can come to be present. Her ongoing project “A Vocabulary of Revolutionary Gestures” investigates how political events manifest and come to be archived in the bodies of their protagonists.