A highlights video of the spatial film installation at the “Typical Organization for standards & order,” within the frame of the MDFF Greece—Athens prelaunch mini-event series. The film installation, organized by the “Typical Organization for standards & order,” “was based on the short “The 5th School (Το 5ο Λύκειο)” by Joshua Olsthoorn, Greece, 2020, 22’30”. English (no dialogues)
“The 5th School: surveillance of nothing” was a typical anti-spectacle played between the inside of our werkraum and the now almost canceled notion of public space (or Sina Street). In our ever more blurred sense of orientation we have to sadly admit that boundaries and borders are ever more tangible…”__Typical Organization
About “The 5th School”
The squat of the 5th Lyceum School was located in the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athens. In 2018 it housed around 200 refugees, mainly families. It was self-managed, with residents volunteering to distribute food donations and to run the squat. Representatives of NGOs were not welcome. The self-organisation meant that a Syrian – former information technology worker set up the WiFi network, an Arabic teacher from Syria gave weekly lessons, and someone who studied hotel management in Damascus worked in the kitchen. The squat was evicted in September 2019. Amongst the 143 evicted migrants were women and children from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They were taken to the Corinth camp, south of Athens. Parents’ associations and teachers demanded the return of 12 children who were taken out of local schools.
“This film reflects on how ‘political designs’ are shaping our environment and us… Applying such thought on anyone active in the industry of image production, this film tries to use typical capitalistic-tech-apparatus against their pre-designed functions. Using an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, the ultimate Machine-eye or Kino-eye to think of Diziga Vertov, one could ‘imagine’ to open closed spaces. Knowing that today’s tech-resources are handled mostly against humanity, we should redesign the way we look at resources. This film seems perhaps just a melancholic document about the remains of human subjects displaced by force, but could from the other hand also be a tool to re-measure solidarity. Could the Machine-eye of the future help us free us from human smallness and assist us in thinking further about how we layout our existence?”__Joshua Olsthoorn, Joshua Olsthoorn, filmmaker, typographic designer, and founder of Typical Organization
Highlights Video by Konstantinos Hillas for ©MDFF Greece
