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Cinematic narratives of eating disorders run the risk of presenting their characters as largely passive — a risk compounded by the fear of ‘contagion’ that haunt the images of bodies affected by these disorders. Paradigmatic examples are not only the images produced by the fashion industry but also the controversial photos posted online by ‘pro-ana’ communities (often presenting anorexia as a lifestyle). The mimetic aspect indeed plays an ambiguous role in drawing the contours of both the definition and the proliferation of eating disorders. For instance, after having diagnosed ‘bulimia nervosa’ in 1979, the psychiatrist Gerald Russell worried that his description of the symptoms had contributed to the dramatic spread of the pathology itself. This is a question for all newly introduced medical categories: do the symptoms proliferate or the diagnosis? But what is, in this respect, the role of cinema in recirculating both highly visible and hidden aspects of eating disorders forming such a prominent part of today’s visual culture? Moara Passoni’s Ecstasy (2020, 80 min) tells the story of the development of the film’s protagonist Clara’s anorexia, from her childhood to her late teenage years, against the background of the political changes of 1990s Brazil. In order to find a language that speaks against visual stereotypes of eating disorders and their spectacularization, Moara shows the way Clara perceives and tries to control reality through her relationship with food. Instead of overexposing the anorectic body, or protecting it by leaving its frailty outside the frame, the Brazilian filmmaker puts the audience in front of the ecstatic spectacle Clara witnesses: her phantasies and desires, her idiosyncrasies and her fears. Thus, in Ecstasy, the overused and often obscure word ‘dysmorphia’ takes multiple forms. It does not only correspond to the discrepancy between the way one looks and the way one perceives oneself. Body dysmorphia here also takes the shape of two imaginary friends/enemies of Clara, a blue dot and an egg, revealing how magical thinking is part of eating disorders. And visually most poignant is Moara’s use of both close-ups and extreme close-ups that mirrors Clara’s morbid need to re-redit reality by cutting it into little pieces according to what she calls ‘the geometry of hunger’. Moara Passoni is a writer-director from Brazil. She graduated from the University of São Paulo in sociology, anthropology, and political sciences, studied dance and performance at Universidade de São Paulo (USP-SP), and philosophy & aesthetics at Université de Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. After finishing a master’s in film and documentary at, she earned an MFA in screenwriting and directing from Columbia University. Êxtase (2020) is her first non-fiction film and premiered in the CPH:DOX main competition. The film was screened, among others, at MoMA ‘DocFortnight’ and at Visions du Réel in Nyon and was awarded several prizes, including the Prix D’Innovation Daniel Langlois at the Festival du Cinema Nouveau and the Jury Award for best newcomers at the São Paulo International Film Festival. Passoni co-wrote and associate produced The Edge of Democracy (2019) by Petra Costa. In addition to the Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary, the film was nominated for best narration/writing by The Critics’ Choice Awards and the International Documentary Association. The Spectacle of Dysmorphia: in Moara Passoni’s film Ecstasy, screening, ICI Berlin, 6 December 2021

Reappropriating, restaging, revisioning, remediating: at the crossroad of the new millennium, reenactment has undoubtedly emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Taking an ever larger distance from notions of historical revival and 'Living History', current reenactments call into question whether the present can unpack, embody, or disentangle the past. Accordingly, to reenact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. If to reenact means not to restore but to challenge the past, history is thus turned into a possible and perpetual becoming, a site for invention and renewal.

Clio Nicastro, Introduction to the screening The Spectacle of Dysmorphia: in Moara Passoni’s film Ecstasy, ICI Berlin, 6 December 2021, video recording, mp4, 11:44

Ecstasy Trailer of the screening The Spectacle of Dysmorphia: in Moara Passoni’s film Ecstasy, ICI Berlin, 6 December 2021, video recording, mp4, 02:03

Saima Akhtar, an urban historian and co-creator of the series ‘In Front of the Factory’, will offer reflections on the advancement of new technologies and the future of work. The aim of the workshop is to foster a discussion among participants about work/labour as a primary site for capitalist accumulation and resistance, as well as the ways in which forms of image-making – particularly film – endorse or fail to support it. This workshop is the third and final installment of the series ‘In Front of the Factory,’ which has focused on questions of work and the ways in which work/labour have been framed in past and contemporary forms of image-making. The workshop presents the research and conversations that accumulated through the series, including topics such as cinematic representations of women’s labour; the presence or absence of domestic and reproductive labour in visual media; the spatial and temporal dimensions of unemployment; the use of cinema for industrial knowledge production and nation-making; and the gendered and racial dimensions of labour in film and photography. Programme 16:00 Introduction by Clio Nicastro 16:15-18:00 Workshop with Saima Akhtar 19:30 Keynote Silvia Federici: The Globalization of Women’s Work and New Forms of Violence Against Women Introduction by Rosa Barotsi As Workers Leave the Factory, What’s Left Behind?, workshop, ICI Berlin, 9 July 2018

Clio Nicastro, Introduction to the lecture Silvia Federici, ‘The Globalization of Women’s Work and New Forms of Violence Against Women’, part of the workshop As Workers Leave the Factory, What’s Left Behind?, ICI Berlin, 9 July 2018, video recording, mp4, 06:27

Much has been made of the influence of media and fashion on the proliferation of eating disorders (ED): The glamorization of skinny and ephebic bodies is blamed for the quasi-epidemic spread of anorexia among young women, and hence the core of ED is often understood to be profoundly mimetic. Yet this link between ED and issues of representation extends even to its most clinical definitions and their inherent difficulties. While ED do affect bodies and gestures, their symptomatology remains elusive. ED thus often appear as disorders constructed around socially conditioned invisibilities. The one-day symposium will examine the discursive and aesthetic challenges that arise with respect to both the definition and representation of eating disorders, taking into account cinematic, literary, and artistic depictions of anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and other forms of food consumption deemed ‘disordered’, keeping in mind that these diagnoses always raise the question of what constitutes ‘normal’, ‘ordered eating’, socially accepted habits and ‘aberrant’ ones – such as diets and obsessive ‘healthy’ or ‘clean’ eating. Since ED can be structured by imitation and concealment rather than a clear manifestation of symptoms, they seem to resist the clinical gaze also in their temporal aspects. Foucault has described modern symptomatology as emerging in conjunction with ideas about a defining course or progression of identifiable diseases (a typical Krankheitsverlauf). Yet ED temporalities are difficult to classify in accordance with the medical language of chronic vs. acute, episodic, sporadic, but also compulsion, addiction, or relapse. As a result, for example, the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic Manual, DSM-5, lowered the frequency threshold for ED symptoms required for a diagnosis. The symposium, thus, will focus on the errant temporalities bundled into ED and fraying quotidian rhythms. Social time is structured around ‘ordinary’ mealtimes and collectively prepared festive occasions, both of which collide with the obsessional temporality characteristic of ED. Disordered eating obeys different rhythms, a time radically stretched or violently compressed. In all this, but even after a supposed ‘recovery’ from an ED, disordered eating remains paradoxically linked to the most elementary, by definition ‘chronic’ condition of an organism dependent on food intake. Can narrative time articulate these temporal complexities; can it absorb the intensely repetitive structures of ED or the questionable notions of recovery and relapse? The still very much uneven gender distribution of ED attests to the perniciously patriarchal structures of social life, yet ED also exhibit the overdetermined nature of consumption in capitalist societies. For many decades, ED have been a focal point of feminist attention and activism. But can the resilience, endurance, and refusal encountered in ED become modes of political resistance? Dis-Ordered Eating: Temporality, Normativity, Representability, symposium, ICI Berlin, 27 April 2018

Since the 1990s, re-enactment has emerged as a key issue in the field of artistic production, in theoretical discourse, and in the socio-political sphere. Current re-enactments question the ability of the present to unpack, embody, and disentangle the past. Thus, to re-enact is to experience the past by reactivating either a particular cultural heritage or unexplored utopias. To re-enact means not to restore but to challenge the past – to not merely repeat it, but to interpret and translate it – in the present and for the present – or for the future. History thereby enters a special temporal dimension, that of a possible and perpetual becoming, opening a space for invention and renewal. The symposium investigates the issue of re-enactment through a discussion at once conceptual and practical. How, and to what extent, does recent history engage in a creative dialogue with a more distant past supposedly reactualized through re-enactment? This process of creative repetition branches out into at least three directions: (1) the return/survival of the past understood as generating meaning and values for both present and potential future/s, in terms of what one could call a symbolic archaeology; (2) an epistemological-axiological challenge to the traditional dichotomy between true and false, original and copy; and (3) a performative bodily practice that physically re-stages events. Methodologically, the notion of re-enactment will be approached from three directions: the archive, the arts, and curatorial practice. Over and Over and Over Again: Re-Enactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, symposium, ICI Berlin, 16–17 November 2017

In the short yet compelling text ‘Einfühlung’ (2008), Harun Farocki questions the relation between distance and identification from the point of view of both the film actor and the spectator. Right at the start of the text, the German filmmaker emphasizes that the term Einfühlung has been ‘handed over to the enemy’. Who is this enemy? And what is the context within which the German filmmaker positions this complex and ambiguous concept? Is ’empathy’ – the term most commonly used to translate Einfühlung – even strictly equivalent to the German term? Over the past decades, many studies have been published on the topic of empathy across a range of disciplines. Yet the debate on this topic is not limited to academic contexts: to react empathically is almost considered a social duty, amplified by the possibilities enabled by new media which allow for immediate contact with stories and experiences of distant people practically simultaneously. The general trend is arguably that of focusing on a supposed fusional relation between subject and object, without taking into account the distance and conflict implicit in sensing the other. Focusing on Farocki’s manifold research relating to the topic of Einfühlung, the workshop seeks to explore these issues, as well as the cinematic techniques/devices used to tackle them. Harun Farocki and the Notion of ’Einfühlung’, workshop, ICI Berlin, 4 July 2016

Clio Nicastro, Introduction to the workshop Harun Farocki and the Notion of ’Einfühlung’, ICI Berlin, 4 July 2016, video recording, mp4, 08:26

“Most narrative films take place in that part of life where work has been left behind.” Harun Farocki’s condemnation of cinema’s unwillingness to represent labour finds echoes in present-day political discussions about the struggles and persistent invisibility of labour in public space. Undocumented labour, the weakening of union organizing, and the decoupling of work from physical space in the era of the Internet, are phenomena that have irreversibly altered everyday life. At the same time, a new vocabulary capturing the expansions of labour – affective labour, care work, women’s work, immaterial and precarious labour – has made it possible to deepen our understanding of what ought to be considered as labour and where this labour happens. In the same vein, a growing number of filmmakers are showing a commitment to render the spaces where work takes place today visible again. Despite arguments to the contrary, film and the moving image have always been concerned with the processes of labour, including the work of cinema itself. If film theorists such as Jean Louis Comolli chastised cinema’s distancing approach to spaces of labour, it could be argued that they had in mind a limited notion of the workspace. In other words, whilst the space in front of the factory has enjoyed relatively little screen time in film’s history, spaces of labour hold an enduring relationship with the medium. This conference will tackle the historically shifting relationship between cinema and the representation of labour spaces and will reflect on the renewed attention to the workspace in today’s art cinema and documentary production., In Front of the Factory: Cinematic Spaces of Labour, conference, ICI Berlin, 26–27 May 2016

‘The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture.’ Amitav Ghosh The Great Derangement This symposium takes the planetary ecological crisis as an urgent occasion to reflect on the history and politics of taste. Talk of taste today is considered outmoded, if not suspect. But is this not itself suspect in the ongoing Great Acceleration, a period defined since the 1950s by excesses of consumption and corresponding disruptions to the earth? In the context of the contemporary ecological crisis, examination of the implicit relation between taste and consumption seems all the more pressing. To what extent has the Great Acceleration been propelled by taste? What might such a question contribute to understanding these twin crises of climate and culture? Attending to taste in the Great Acceleration involves analyzing the proliferation and the allure of certain aesthetic forms, materials, and attitudes – as well as the obfuscation of the associated production of waste. And it means revisiting historical debates since the 1950s in aesthetic theory and culture critique for their blindspots and evasions as much as for their insights. Might reflection on the politics of taste indicate an intersection of affective embodied experience with the ostensibly more abstract categories of cosmopolitan politics, the global economy, and planetary ecology? Is there an alternative sensus communis to the rampant consumerism that has driven the Great Acceleration and that can no longer be dismissed as mere bad taste? Bad Taste?: Culture and Consumption in the Great Acceleration, symposium, ICI Berlin, 17 June 2022

Another Screen together with ICI Berlin presents two rarely exhibited films on hands and their place in relation to fate, work, pleasure, touch, and surveillance: Maria Lassnig’s Palmistry (1974) and Ayesha Hameed’s A Rough History (of the destruction of fingerprints) (2015). These two short films are accompanied by a transcribed roundtable discussion, which includes a number of voices: Rachel Aumiller, Sam Dolbear, Nadine El-Enany, Amelia Groom, Clio Nicastro, Daniella Shreir, Anja Sunhyun Michaelsen, and M. Ty. Hands Tied is programmed as part of Sam Dolbear’s ICI project ‘Cosmic Reductions: Palms, Fate, Body, Character’, which has a newsletter available for subscription here. Further documentation on another-screen.com Hands Tied, screening, An Another Screen, 2–18 April 2021

Time is told by clocks and narrators, yet not in equal measure. Narration can slow time down or speed it up, it can take big chunks of time to narrate a minute or narrate a whole day in a split second. Among narrative tenses, the past takes pride of place. But how is the future told in which things are about to happen? What time, what temporal consistency or fragmentation, what counterfactual fraying emerges if narratives employ future tenses? Is there something inherently erratic in narrating futures? Is the use of future tense able to make us pause and distance ourselves from what is being told, or does it dissolve into an ever more porous actuality? The ICI Library Event Only Time Will Tell will explore the eccentric aspects of the future tense in the context of the ICI’s current research focus Errans, in Time. It will consist of a staged reading delving into the manifold ways of literary futures and, in its second half, the opening of the exhibition Untimely Now, an art installation of former train station clocks by Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann.Programme Welcome: Corinna Haas Introduction to the Exhibition: Claudia Peppel Part 1 Staged Reading: Only Time will Tell ICI Fellows will read excerpts from Tom McCarthy, Lydia Davis, Maurice Blanchot, Christine Brooke-Rose, Thomas Mann, and others. Part 2 Opening of the Exhibition: Untimely Now The artists Franziska and Sophia Hoffmann will be present. Only Time Will Tell, ici library event, ICI Berlin, 5 December 2017

Waiting at the border, the government office, the hospital. Waiting one’s turn, holding the line. Waiting for the end of the play, for a diagnosis, for sleep. Waiting for an answer, a visa, or a loved one. Waiting for something that will never come. Waiting is often conceived of as pointless void, idle or ‘stolen’ time, provoking shapeless boredom, or as ritualized demonstration of power, exercise of passivity – rarely, however, as deferral, productive break, an interstitial moment of contemplation and reflection. Nobody likes to wait, nobody likes to be kept waiting. Yet waiting is also understood to provide the most immediate, emblematic, albeit infuriating experience of time. Is it possible to say, conversely, that, as long as there is time, experience is marked, at least in part, by the curious suspension of waiting? ‘Waiting’ will explore the enervating and exhilarating aspects of waiting in the context of the ICI’s current research focus ERRANS, in Time. In two parts, this year’s ICI Library Event will explore the socio-political implications of the ways in which we are being kept waiting and the paradoxical fullness and intensification of time spent waiting. Waiting, ici library event, ICI Berlin, 7 December 2016

A digression, a not-coming-to-the-point opens the concrete to the unknown; simple shifts and interruptions lead to explorations of unforeseen realities. Digressions manifest themselves in many ways – as distraction, excursus, or detour – and are commonly deployed as a rhetorical, scientific, or literary device, but also as associative parlando or political strategy. Digressions are supposed to render narrative accounts more accessible, provide access to remote areas, divert from the topic or argumentation, disturb the flow of storytelling, increase suspense, or delay the result. The question therefore becomes: what do they distract from? Is there a current, path, red thread, or direction to lose sight of – or does the digression merely pretend to have lost sight of it? The ICI Library Event But I Digress will let the mind wander and explore the enervating and reinvigorating aspects of digression in the context of the ICI’s current research focus ERRANS. The event will consist of a staged reading delving into the manifold ways of literary digression and, in its second half, the opening of an exhibition of artworks by Jochen Flinzer, Jenny Keuter, Axel Malik, and Patrick Vernon. Faint pencil traces, scribbled messages, despairing lines, stitched contours, and stretching threads will continue the reflections on digression and present themselves in space or on paper, ranging from the elusive and emblematic to the raptures of minimalism. The works, mostly pen, thread, and print, reveal the polysemic play of wandering lines, contours, and forms. The artworks will be on display from 8 December 2015 – 14 January 2016 in the ICI Library. The exhibition is curated by Claudia Peppel.Welcome: Corinna Haas and Arnd WedemeyerIntroduction to the Exhibition: Claudia Peppel But I Digress, ici library event, ICI Berlin, 8 December 2015