Single-channel video installation, 48 min. English, Italian.
Juxtaposing images of the production sites of the pharmaceutical-chemical industry with speculations on the historical, social, and material conditions of Cyanotype photography, Blueness probes into the (gendered) politics of materiality and the (violent) historicities of its form.
The film follows a figure that proceeds through the stages of exposing and developing a Cyanotype. They revisit factories in Seveso, Italy and Basel, Switzerland that both relate directly to the history of the synthetic dye “Prussian Blue”. In the latent period, when the images are exposed but not yet developed, the figure searches to define their body as both commodity and consumer of pharmaceutical products. This body is modelled on the productive body of Fordist labor. Yet like the industrial sites that appear as remnants of an older mode of production, this body has been fundamentally reconfigured to conform to post-industrial working conditions. Subsequently, the figure aims to perform against pharmaceutical substances and prepare for a neoliberal take-over of their movements, lingering between the roles of researcher, scientist, athlete, pharmacist, patient, woman.
Kerstin Schroedinger is an artist based in Berlin working in film, video, sound, and performance. Her historiographic practice questions the means of image production, historical continuities, and ideological certainties of representation. Since 2011 she has been a member of the Cinenova Working Group of the feminist film distribution Cinenova in London. Her work has been shown at art institutions and film festivals worldwide.
